The Field Trip from Hell

A couple weeks into the summer semester the school decided to have two days of field trips. I was scheduled to go all of the first day but not the second day since that was my day off. Instead of my typical "promo hours" on Friday they had set me up with a help session (I sit at the school waiting for students to show up for tutoring). I convinced the manager to drop my help sessions on Friday morning in exchange for going on the morning part of the field trip on the second day.

The following is part of an email I sent to friends and family explaining the field trip:

We were still scheduled to work and had to go to school in the morning but instead of teaching we were herded on to buses with about 160 kids. Yesterday we all went to the Xuzhou museum where we saw clay pots and whatnot from 60,000 to 40,000 years ago. We also saw a huge jade tomb from 8 AD. It was interesting but it is hard to imagine that stuff is really that old. I don't believe it myself especially when the museum is free and smells of mildew. Just my opinion though... After that we went to the lake (which has the cleanest water in all of Xuzhou) and walked around aimlessly then took some pictures.After they decided that we had enough pictures taken we went back to town near the school and had lunch. A typical Chinese lunch with about 8 people at a table and a lazy susan in the middle holding about 12 different dishes. All the foreign teachers were put together at one table with two unfortunate Chinese kids. Those kids were horrible! We named one of them Lunchbox because he was extremely rude and every time a new dish would come he would spin the lazy susan so the dish was in front of him. He would shovel the food from the dish to his plate, bowl, part of the table, his mouth, and his hands. Eventually we all started grabbing the lazy susan and spinning the new food away from him so we could get some food and he wouldn't eat it all.After that we went to the aquarium. We spent a good 10 minutes herding the kids across the 1/4 mile long bridge to the aquarium and another 30 minutes waiting for our tour guide who never arrived before we just walked through the aquarium by ourselves which took about 10 minutes. Most of our day was spend herding children and counting them millions of times to make sure we weren't missing any.The worst part of that day was that one of my favorite students, Jimmy, had a bathroom accident and had to go home early. He is always so much fun to be around. He's 9 years old and is just the cutest little thing in the world! On the way back to school one of my favorite C3s, Emily, sat next to me on the bus. Half way to the school she passed out in my lap. When we arrived at school I woke her up and she looked so embarrassed that she had fallen asleep on her foreign teacher. She was just too cute!

Pictures of day one.

The second day we planned to go to the zoo. I was really excited but had to keep in mind that the word "habitat" doesn't translate. We get to the zoo. There are huge colorful statues everywhere. I thought, okay, it won't be so bad... Well apparently it isn't just a zoo. It is a zoo/amusement park/meditation hill/hiking trail/etc. All the colorful statues were for the happy amusement park (and possibly to soften the harshness of the "zoo"). We get into the "zoo" and the first animals I see are skin and bones bears in a huge concrete pit. Next we see the area where they have a circus show type thing. This is yet another huge concrete pit. In the pit along with ladders and balls and see-saws for the tricks are tigers in pens. One of the pens had two tigers in it and they were obviously cramped in there together. We continue on. Next is a row of foul smelling pens about 7'x10' with individual animals in them. In one of these pens is a three legged raccoon of some sort. Next to it is a porcupine that couldn't walk without limping. Next to that was some sort of dog with half its hair missing. In it's little house you could see what had happened to all its hair as it was laying all over the place. The poor little thing was so sick or hot or something that it had begun tearing all its hair out. I'm not going to lie. I cried. Not just because of the dog but all of it put together. I had seen three tiny areas of the zoo and just couldn't help it. These animals are being abused. There was a pen of geese not 10 feet from the pond. They couldn't get to the pond though. They were all crammed in this little pen with no water for them to play in. I had pretty much given up on looking at things until Patrick finds me and tells me about how just up ahead there is a cage with vultures in it and what looks to be a dead bald eagle in the water. I go up with him and see the vultures but I didn't see a bald eagle in the water. Turns out the eagle is alive and walking around the cage now. He won't be living for long though as he has a huge bloody, dirty gash on one of its wings. The cut looked pretty new and pretty infected. Because I am supposed to be entertaining these children I went and looked at the disgustingly thin tigers and then followed them to the monkey house. It was a typical monkey house but without the ropes and tree limbs. You go up stairs and look down into a concrete pit with a pond in it. The first thing I see is a bunch of trash in the water. I then see a baboon looking animal walk into the water and start picking up the garbage to try to eat it. The water is disgusting. I go to take some pictures and one of the bigger kids grabs my arm and brings me to another part of the wall and proceeds to show me his empty Sprite bottle and to look at the baboon down in the pit. He then tells me to throw the bottle down in the water. I sternly say no and he turns around and starts pitching trash at the monkey thing. It was horrible. One of Pat's kids sprayed one of the monkeys with juice or pop or something and Pat smacked him on the head and yelled at him loudly with a lot of swear words. All the kids got the message. My group did not see the tiger and bear show. From the sound of it, it was a typical zoo animal show except when the animals didn't do their tricks they got hit in the face with sticks. I was never so happy to leave a zoo and I don't particularly like zoos. I wanted to go today because I wanted to see what a Chinese zoo was like; I suppose I found out.

Pictures of day two.