Somehow I managed to dream up yet more lessons to fill 3 weeks, and suddenly my year was over. I’d expected that although I’d had times when I’d looked forward to the end, when it came I’d wish I could do it all again. I didn’t. I said goodbye to my classes and gave them a quiz to see if they could remember anything I’d taught them, then gave as prizes all the junk I’d brought thinking it would be useful and finally just needed to get rid of, like magazines, comics, tartan pencils and little flags. At times in my goodbyes I almost thought that I loved teaching after all and wished I could stay, but never quite believed it and felt only a little emotional as I wandered back to my flat after my last class. If anything, there was a tinge of relief there.  

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My father and brother arrived in ffice:smarttags" />Beijing that weekend, and I took a 20-hour train to meet them in Yunnan province for three weeks of adventure around China before it was finally home-time. We climbed over incredible gorges, explored old villages, took very bumpy sleeper buses, and saw the biggest Buddha in the world which is carved into the side of a cliff. Then it was back to Chongqing to pick up my things and have a last meal with the people I’d shared my year with, then off again. We saw the Terracotta Warriors in Xian which was quite impressive, and then in Beijing walked around the Temple of Heaven which is covered in scaffolding for a year, apparently in preparation for the Olympic crowds. The Great Wall was, as expected, a highlight, and was even worth the 4-hour bus journey there and the hanging around on the way back when the bus broke down on the motorway and we sat there for an hour before getting out and hailing another bus to take us the last hour’s drive into the capital. This was our second bus breakdown of the trip, after the previous week when we had got stuck in a tunnel and the driver had played with bolts in the engine for an hour before realizing that he’d run out of petrol. However the bus breakdowns came nowhere near being as infuriating as the rip-offs. Dad and Owen had been got when they first arrived, being charged 400 yuan for a 100 yuan taxi trip from the airport to their hotel. Then in Yunnan when we bought plane tickets to fly to Sichuan, we were charged both commission which was over the going rate, and then tricked into paying our tax twice, which we didn’t realise until it was too late. Finally, in the Temple of Heaven park, we drank a nice coffee and then were hit with a 95 yuan bill, which is about £7 and could feed someone for a month in China. After that experience, I was so mad that I wrote a poem. Please don’t laugh as it’s not supposed to be a work of art, and I realise that the last sentence is probably quite untrue, but that’s just how I was feeling at the time, under the tree, after being ripped off.

                        Heavenly Illusion

            Under a tree in Heavenly Park

            All is shade, but not too dark

            Insects burr and birds tweet tweet

            Around me and my earthy seat

            Scores of ants run over bricks

            Birds fly by over fallen sticks

            A cool breeze rustles leaf and branch

            Then calm.

            But plastic music, wooden chairs

            Chinese people stop and stare

            I notice cars and painted rails

            The peace begins to crumple and fail

            Noisy tourists crashing by

            The beauty all now seems a lie

            Not nature-formed but man-constructed

            For money.

And the next day I wrote another, while sitting on the bus for the Great Wall, waiting for an hour and a half for it to get on its way:

                        The Bus

            Sunny sky, stuffy bus.

            When will we leave?

This was on the bus that all the travel agents had told us did not exist. They told us we had to go to Badaling, and that that was the best place, but we kept trying and eventually found this bus to get to Simatai. Badaling is meant to be Great Wall Disneyland, where all the tourists go, almost totally reconstructed and not really a proper wall experience. Simatai is really impressive, the wall’s built up over steep mountain ridges, and is not too reconstructed, so it was really a much better choice we thought. There’s a cable car up which we didn’t take, and as we climbed along the wall up to the cable car stop, we were accompanied by some Chinese pop music which was rather irritating, being as we were trying to get a feel for a piece of history and not really being in the mood for singing along to this week’s most popular love song, but that was only a small section and it didn’t spoil the experience too much.

Saturday, the Great Wall of China. Sunday, I’m back in Dundee. I’ve left behind that strange country, where people decide to take their dog for a walk and so pick it up,  carry it around for an hour, then go home; where the people who work in places you go to have name badges with no name, just a number; where people don’t eat the meaty breast of their animals but prefer to dine on brains, intestines and congealed blood. Now it’s all just a memory, a bunch of photos and a few dozen weblog entries. Now, far from being a Foreign Expert with responsibility for the cultural education of 800 young minds, I’m jobless and lost in my mum and dad’s house. The future is not so much a haze in my mind, as a slide-show of vivid images, all totally different from one another, none of which could really exist in harmony with any other, but represents a complete potential for my life. Which, if any, will materialize, I can only guess. I feel like a soap opera fan whose favourite soap has been suspended for an indefinite period, and one day it will come back on and I’ll see at last what happens next. All I can really do is wait and see.