I left Changsha and my month of teaching orientation 10 days ago. In two days I have my first day of class as an English teacher here in Huaihua. The question when I first arrived here in Huaihua was, what should I do now? There were some necessary errands such as cleaning up my apartment, buying things to fill up my now clean apartment, and the very important task of getting my residency permit.

Let me explain a Residency Permit. I came to China with a visa that granted me thirty days to go and get this permit. A residency permit is just about the most important thing I carry with me here in China. It grants a quasi green card status, letting me work and live in China while also allowing me to leave and enter the country as many times as I want. The problem is getting one. You need letters from everyone and their cousin, an unbelievably thorough health exam done in China (blood tests for HIV, chest x-rays for TB, ultra sounds for my possible pregnancy, and urine tests etc etc), certificates from my school saying they can host foreigners, my passport, my Foreign Expert card, and a long list of other crap that they xerox many times. My field director recommended doing this towards the end of our week of freedom so we could travel, I wasn’t given a choice.

A week ago my liaison said that we would go to the police station on Monday. Seeing what was going on I settled my affairs in Huaihua and hopped a train for Changsha on Friday night to see some people and get out of the city while I could. Good thing I still had my passport when I went because the police at the train station (there were dozens and dozens, the Olympics were still going on) stopped me noting my passport information and grilling me for ten minutes. That has never happened to me before at a Chinese train station, a few days later the reason would be made clear to me. So after a almost completely restless overnight train ride, during which I vowed to always take the fast and comfortable bus from now on, I arrived in Changsha at 6 am. I got breakfast in the early quiet of my old home before taking a half-hour bus ride to the Changsha south bus station where I could catch a bus to Shaoshan, Mao Zedong’s hometown. I was thinking, at the time, that I couldn’t just chill in chic Changsha while I should be getting to know my new home, Huaihua, so I used a day trip to Shaoshan as an excuse for my excursion from the west of Hunan.

As I should have guessed Shaoshan was a dud of a day trip. It took me two hours in a cramped bus to get there. Once there a dude got me to pay him 5 RMB to carry me to Mao’s birthplace. I bumbled around there for like an hour trying to squeeze between the hordes of Chinese tourists seeing the sights. The best part were the captions found in his perfectly proletarian family home. The one in the kitchen read, I’m paraphrasing: “This is where Mao Zedong used to gather his family around to explain the teachings of Marxism and peasant revolutionism.” A little ridiculous. However the soldiers standing at attention in every room and the many elderly Chinese, who no doubt love the Chinese Communist Party for reasons a Laowai like me would never understand, put me in a serious and contemplative mood. It felt like I was walking around a Buddhist temple. The rest of my time in Shaoshan was a yawn, except that I talked someone into giving me a free ride on his moped. I arrived back in Changsha by 3:30 meeting up with friends for a fun night of food and drink.

–Me in front of Mao’s birthplace

I got to Huaihua, by bus, Sunday evening in time for my Monday appointment with the police. I really dislike dealing with the police, no matter what country they’re in. They are slow, often incompetent, far too numerous, and take forever to do simple tasks. That was exactly the situation I ran into when I first went to the station on Monday. Interestingly though I discovered that Huaihua is an area of China banned from playing host to foreigners, yet obviously not entirely. The city has military bases somewhere with nuclear warheads aimed at (according to wikipedia) American Guam. The Chinese, seeing as I am so dashing and crafty, naturally suspect me of being a spy and therefore had me fill out an extra form saying I was traveling to Huaihua. They told me it would take a week for the permit, so I hunkered down in Huaihua.

Then I had four friends visit and decided I should in fact do some traveling while I still could. So I went to liaison asking if we could get a receipt from the police saying they have my passport so I could travel and sleep in hotels, as the police had done for my fellow teachers in Changsha. They were not accommodating at all. Luckily my liaison has a classmate who lives near the police station and knows someone high up at the police station, guanxi baby! He is a short man with no noticeable commanding features, though going by people’s reactions he has a good bit of power. Previously we had just dealt with three unhelpful women who seem to have no power greater than a secretary. Once he walked in they got right to work, but as it turns out they had done their job on Monday when they xeroxed my myriad of forms, certificates and identifications. All that was required was the signature of some even higher male official who was away and no one knew for how long. Leaders of that caliber always seem to be away for no apparent reason. In the end guanxi (connections) saved the day and I got my passport on wednesday, a full five days before I was supposed to.

So off to Fenghuang me and my friends went! We left Huaihua at 4:30 and arrived to a touristy yet somehow charming riverside village. Fenghuang means phoenix and it looks like this.

Its getting late here so I’m going to wrap this up. Fenghuang was a nice place to chill and walk around. It reminded me of Lijiang in Yunnan, due to its almost (but definitely not) ancient feel and hordes of tourists. We were only there for a night, most of which was spent eating at night-markets and sipping imported coffee the next morning. I’ll get back there no doubt since it’s only two hours away from me. G’night!