Wanted: Foreigners

I'm refraining from showing a picture of the delicious brownies I made the other day for the sake of my father-in-law, who's fasting this week. Aren't I so kind? I won't talk about how surprisingly good they were considering the combination of ingredients -- or how healthy for that matter. I won't even post a picture of their goodness. I'll wait till next week to tell you about the coconut crust that we could've sat there and ate all on it's own. Yup, I'll wait till he's back eating food again to talk about food. After all, I'm so considerate.

White, Caucasian, foreigners are few and far between in our city. For the most part (with the exception of Guilin and Kunming), Southern China is severely over-looked by most foreigners when traveling. I understand. China is so big. And when the Great Wall is on one side of the country but the most beautiful scenery is on the other, its not much of a toss up really. The Great Wall wins hands down every time. Where we live isn't exactly fángbiàn (convenient). But the advantage to this is, more people are willing to speak Chinese with us here. Go any further north than Shanghai and you have no need to speak Chinese at all. But here, there's very little English. And the majority of English majors in university speak poorly because English teachers are few and far between too.

For example, I met a girl a while back at an English corner. I said "So what do you do? What's your job?" After I asked her to repeat herself for the third time, I realized she was saying she was an English Teacher at the local university. Ah, that explains why the danger sign at the end of our street says: The Attention is Safe. Or why you might hear a friendly face say "Con gata lation to meet you!"

Often, we'll get a call from someone saying, "We need foreigners to do this" and it could be anything from reading stories to modeling 'European style clothing' to being on TV. And this is how we found ourselves in a little, tiny village yesterday, smiling and shaking hands with village officials, "proving that foreigners would be interested in the project they would be putting in place there". Now I'm picky -- I don't see any purpose is doing these things unless I agree with what's going on, so upon my request for information, my friend explained Guangxi is the fourth poorest province in China due to its high volume of peasants and farmers. Even though there's some 6 million people in our city, that's a very small portion of the province's population -- most of which still live in the very poor villages in the countryside. Now despite the media, there are some in China that care for the environment and fair trade issues. Our friend's business seeks to establish small ecological friendly (as much as one can here in China) resorts where tourists can come into the countryside and invest into the local economy. For example, the resturant would only sell local food from local produce. The locals would work the business and hopefully, relationships between the tourists/city dwellers and the locals would be strengthened and both would learn from each other's way of life. Anyway, it still has a lot of kinks to be worked out from what I can see, but I thought the concept was brilliant. We already said we'd be interested to bring our friends along to one of these places when they come to visit us. So we met (or rather stood around while the Chinese met) with the town officials, were blessed by a performance for which the entire village turned out for (they even cancelled school that day in our honour so the students could perform for us!) and ate at the highest village official's home (I survived and I didn't have to eat meat!). I think my favourite part was when they took us to their local orchards to pick oranges...I do miss doing that in America! Basically, yesterday's excursion, boiled down to attend school or skip school and go to the 'real life' village for a day and speak as much Chinese as we could. I didn't need to be asked twice.

We were exhausted, filthy, and Chinese languaged out at the end of the day but it was a lot of fun. After all, we're here to "experience" China first hand!