Purdin Forest

I was in class and we had pretty much wound down for the day. Some of the students had even left. I released them a bit early as we had finished the lesson plan for the day.

I was then approached by a couple of students that told me that they were going to the forest park on Saturday and asked if I wanted to come with them. I said, “yes.”

Their reaction was one of shock. I found it a bit funny. It looked to me like one of those moments when someone is invited with the hope and plan that they would say, “no.”

I was told that was not the case. They just had not expected me to be willing to come along.

I asked them the standard questions: when do we meet, where do we meet, how much should I expect to spend, and similar stuff. They had no answers. That was fine, I am used to how the Chinese plan. They told me that someone would call me with the details.

The details were, that we would meet at the main gate of the school on Saturday morning at 07:30 and take a bus from there. Further, I should bring at least two bottles of water (the standard bottle is 600ml) and a lunch.

So, the night before I insured that my daysack contained water, a camera, and extra batteries. I got up about 06:45 and was at the gate on time. Of course, the students were nowhere to be found.

I sent them a message (SMS is real big here) and someone came to meet me and guide me to where they were. They were eating breakfast in an alley that I often get my dinner, from various cart vendors, at. It seems that the bus they had charted had broken down on the way to the school. The good part was that my, muttered, comment, “this bodes ill,” was entirely un-understood by all around me. I had no wish to further jinx the outing. Even though they were behind the schedule that they had set, they seemed to be having fun.

The bus finally arrived and it was large enough for all that were coming, which was about twenty. It was at this point that I noticed that there were many more young men on this outing than I had ever seen in class. I asked if all the people with us were in my class V and I was assured that they were. I then pointed out that several of the people had a lot of explaining to do, as I had never seen them in class. It was at that point that some of the girls, grudgingly, admitted that they had brought their boyfriends along.

I saw no problem with it and, as far as I know, there is no rule forbidding it; however, there were comments to the effect of, “you wont tell our head teacher, will you?” So, from that I assume that it was, indeed, some minor infraction.

We got to the park and took the requisite pictures at the entrance. At that point they went to get the tickets for entrance.

I fully intended to pay the full price for admission (about 15RMB, or $2USD); however, my students had a different idea. They wanted me to get in at the student rate of 10RMB. So, they pointed out, truthfully, that I was their teacher. They then added that I was there to keep them put of trouble, the ticket seller was asked, “after all, you wouldn't want us to get into trouble would you.”

With that came the, aw shit, if for no other reason than merely by virtue of rank..., “I am in charge,” feeling. The good news was that this was, by Chinese standards, a well behaved group.

From there we wandered along the main path and I took quite a number of pictures, for which they were later grateful as my SLR took much better pictures than they had brought. I tried to get at least one good picture of each established couple. I ended up shooting a couple hundred pictures. Of course, most of them were trash, but there were a few gems in the pile.

They like to pose for pictures so it was sometimes hard to get pictures of them just having fun. This comes from the habits formed with film cameras where each picture was an expensive proposition. I later showed them the entire series, at the beginning of class, which got a lot of enjoyment and laughs.

We had lunch at a small pond that was partially drained for maintenance. I found the supports for the trees, in the pond, to be interesting. The students were bothered by the small amount of food that I had brought for my lunch (it was enough) and kept pushing more food on me.

From the lunch stop (at least they did not find it necessary to spend three hours for lunch, as is common) we continued to a playground. An American safety nut would, if they visited this playground, suffer from, “immediate exploding cranium syndrome.” For all the outlandish lack of safety, the students had a lot of fun and I got a pile of pictures. I also bumped into some of my students who were in other classes and just happened to be there at the same time.

We then walked some more. About the time we got to the end of the park the sky started to drip a bit so we began to walk back. They were sure that my bringing an umbrella is what caused it to begin raining (It seems that their logic says that if only one person brings an umbrella, then that one umbrella caused the rain). As I was wearing a hat I never did see a need to remove the umbrella from my pack. It really never did rain that hard.

We hot back and found that the bus, which was supposed to wait for us, had left. So, they called for its return and we waited bout an hour, or a little more, in the visitors center. The bus finally returned and we went back to the campus.