Early Impressions: Part II The Wider World

(First Written November 2016)

I feel my star may be on the rise for a couple of days ago on the spooky night of Halloween Callum and I were greeted warmly on the bus by some loquacious middle-schoolers. Most children in this part of China now have a certain level of English that far outstrips the abilities of their parents and many will shout Hello to you on the streets if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky they’ll shout foreigner (laowai) perhaps in the vain hopes that you had forgotten and will see fit to reward them for the service of reminding you about your Caucasian skin. These students were, however exceptionally talented and put a number of my university students to shame. We were having a very pleasant chat about our plans – them a party, me my bed - and feeling like there was nothing else to say I informed them that I taught at the university. There was a pause and, from the back of the group a lone voice uttered Stephen? And like a wave the recognition spread. Knowingly the others echoed Stephen, Stephen, this must be Stephen.

I might have been tired and this might all be a concoction of that steadily inflating ego but I am sure I never told them that my name is Stephen. In fact, a few of us give fake names when talking to strangers here for our own safety so I’m forced to conclude that the Stephen Legend is steadily growing. Duyun is still being built and the skyline is ever punctuated by the swinging arms of cranes building tower blocks of housing. I’ve developed a fantasy of old Stephen, wizened and frail returning one last time to his old home in China like Bilbo Baggins visiting the elves and seeing a 50 foot golden statue of his younger self immortalized for ever. Stephen Higham, the plaque will read So Tall, So Handsome.

The job and your reputation precede and follow you around here. Video phones are constantly present in our classes, we are recorded by them and watched on them, there is no point trying to hide from them. It is not uncommon that a student’s family are too poor to buy them glasses so one way that they might get around the problem of reading off the board is by sharing one pair of glasses between two or three, the glasses passed along like a cheeky hip-flask in the back row. The other way is that they take photos of the board on their phones. I’ve caught glances of myself in various positions, gesticulating emphatically before a board filled with English words and my own tawdry illustrations. The recordings are not deleted at the end of class.

Sam went to Guiyang one weekend and upon entering his class on Monday morning was confronted with cries of Where were you? Where did you go? Baffled, he asked how they knew that he had gone away. Someone the student replied, far more ominously than was perhaps intended took a photo of you. In the bus station. That someone wasn't even one of his students.

I hate it, Sam told me it’s like there’s no escape, it’s like having paparazzi following you around. Like being famous but with none of the good things, none of the money.

It is not all easy sailing in the celebrity spotlight. I might be more used to standing in front of a class but I am still performing to 50 students in an alien tongue and that certainly can be nerve wracking. I have always been a worrier. Some of my earliest memories are a very little Stephen worrying about where he put his 50 pence or how to get out of the tree in the garden and when I say worry, I mean agonise. Agonise as though life, death and the revolution of the Earth were at stake. I do it now, all the time, I sit up at night worrying about global warming or whether or not I’m happy and why I’m not happy and wondering if the reason I’m not happy is because of global warming or the fact that I worry so much. Aimee has been a great help in the moments when I start winding myself up. I sat in the office, many weeks later looking at third of the listening textbooks that I had ever marked a power-chord of self-loathing strumming with every wrong answer I read. This is all my fault, I thought and came out with a stream of paranoid waffle. I can’t do this, this is mad, I’m entirely unqualified for this job. She was able to talk me down until I opened up the next textbook and saw a perfect set of answers in lovely, neat handwriting so I can’t be failing all of them.

There are really nice benefits to being a teacher here too. For one thing the students are eager to befriend you and are even more eager to make you feel comfortable and welcome (outside of class.) Aimee broke something in her leg as a result of what I can only describe as a misguided attempt to exercise. She spent two nights in hospital and was accompanied at all times by two students on rotating shifts set by the university. 

I myself have befriended - entirely within the realms of the professional teacher-student sphere – two young men in my Listening Class 3. If I ask them to get a key for my classroom door (almost always locked when I’m meant to be teaching there) they will run to get it and recently they offered to buy me my water (I always keep a bottle of water on my desk during lessons as my students’ listening involves a lot of Stephen talking loudly and clearly). I let them buy it for me but insisted on paying them back. Ha ha said Daria (an English teacher in his own right who doesn’t always laughs but often says Ha ha) You foreigners are always drinking so much water! This is one of the strange, unexpected cultural differences that I have come across. Drinking water is one of my weird Western habits that I parade in front of my classes, sometimes to their audible amusement.

Another episode that revealed to me how out of touch I was with the Chinese youth involved a boy Allen. I have developed a routine in class of making sure that there is always writing to support the students’ listening as they find it difficult to connect the sound of words with their meaning but know the sight of them. This leads to a lot of chalk on my clothes and about six black-board cleans per lesson. One lesson I realised too late that someone had removed my chalk duster and so I took a small tissue from my bag and cleaned the board with that, leaving ugly smudges wherever it went. Half way through my fruitless task I was joined at the front of the class by this student who had whipped out a large cloth and scrubbed the board clean in seconds. Laughter rang through the classroom and like the yolo-er I am I joined in with a teacher-y chuckle that I made sure everyone could hear so that the power remained with me. 

I had assumed that this event was so funny because I had been trying to clean two sizeable chalkboards with one diminutive facial tissue but as my class filed out the next one filed in (Hi Stephen, Hi!) with the pronunciation teacher, David. I began to clean my board but he stopped me and murmured helpfully but entirely seriously in my ear No, this is not a job for you. This is the board monitor’s job. It was just one of those faux-pas, like drinking water (which Chinese people don’t do) or pulling the sides of your eyes out in a cruel mockery of the beautiful, oriental visage (which I certainly do not do). I am a teacher now and not only do I deserve respect, I am expected to command it like one commands a student to clean a board.

Early Impressions: Part I The Teaching

(Originally written November, 2016)

As an English as a Foreign Language Teacher (Or English as a Secondary Language Teacher to people who trained themselves in a different online course to TEFL) one of the most time-consuming parts of my life in China is the teaching. I have a part-time contract which affords me a lot of movie watching, novel writing and bumming about the flat time but in addition to my seven two-hour classes per week there is the energy that goes into marking, planning lessons, assembling slide-shows and agonizing with nerves over the minutia of communicating with people who have been taught English primarily by memorizing Shakespeare plays (accuracy of this piece of wisdom from the TEFL course may vary from student to student.)

My main responsibility in the Qiannan Normal College is a big one, I am the English Listening teacher of all 200-odd English major freshmen. I also teach half of them Extensive Reading. For seven weeks now I’ve been stumbling along amicably, though I hope not incompetently, I can see that I have come a long way. My first class was a nightmare, a turn up to school in your underwear, a singing a song at the end of About a Boy nightmare but really I can’t see how it could have gone any other way.

I came to China, with flatmate Callum, through a private company affiliated with the CEAIE called The China Teaching Experience. The flat fee at the start of the emigration process covered one-to-one support with the CEO Andrew, help navigating our way around the expensive and often unpredictable Chinese emigration process and TEFL training. The training was made up of two parts. First an online course consisting of eight modules and a tick-the box test which mostly assumed I would be staying in a different part of China and mostly assumed I would be teaching high school or primary school students. The second component was supposed to be two weeks of practical in-class training, observing teachers and getting experience placing ourselves in charge of class rooms. I spent those two weeks playing Lego Marvel Superheroes on the X-Box 360 and teaching myself how to make steak pie (badly.) I waited and waited for an update that wasn’t coming about my Chinese visa.

In the English Department the university is lucky enough to have eight foreigners teaching. Callum and I from The CTE; Lettice and Aimee from The British Council, Sam and Ethan from the Peace Corps and a married couple named Cliff and Rebekah from Georgia who have lived in Duyun for four years now and studied Chinese at the university before taking on teaching positions. Aimee had the experience of taking a practical training course called CELTA before applying through the British Council and Lettice has traveled the world and is naturally self-assured as a teacher should be. Cliff and Rebekah know the culture, the customs and the language. Ethan and Sam, most impressively of all were given a three-month training session in Chengdu with time in class and Mandarin training. Callum and I have our online, multiple-choice-examined course.

I don’t want to dwell on my first lesson. It certainly taught me that it is impossible to adequately prepare for something when you don’t know what needs preparing. On that first day I ran about twenty minutes short of the hour and forty minutes that I was supposed to fill. The first ten minutes were consumed with my failing to operate the computer and power-point (turned off at the wall) and the last with my belligerently uncommunicative students not asking me questions when I had clearly written in my lesson plan “Students will ask questions about me and life in Scotland.” I even forgot to take the register.

Following that awful first lesson I sat, shell shocked in the Foreign English Teachers’ office staring into the middle distance. Aimee and Ethan were about to begin their Oral lesson which included a similar personal introduction section to mine. How did it go? asked Aimee and with the horrified aura of a trauma survivor I replied They don’t talk, they never talk. And the lesson! It was 20 minutes short because they just don’t talk! Luckily this was enough warning for her to begin thinking about some additional games and exercises to fill the time if her lesson ran short too.

I was able to talk to a number of my co-workers over the course of that afternoon and they each had some well-chosen words of comfort. You’ll have a horrible first week Sam assured me, You just will. They’re not used to foreigners and since most of them are girls they won’t be used to the fact that you’re a man either. Certainly this is true, my students come mostly from rural backgrounds and apparently most rural parents in this part of the world have stricter control over their progeny than we are used to. Hence the discovery of B. O. Y. S. doesn’t come until they move away from the constraints of home to arrive in university. It’s like middle-school here, I remember Ethan telling us. Comfortingly enough he also later told me that my first class, class Number 4, are exceptionally shy and that even with a year’s teaching experience under his belt he had difficulty getting them to talk.

Shyness is not the only reason that a class might refuse to answer you. They’re all about getting things right, Cliff told me. In class, all throughout their education they’ve been told by their teachers that this is something they need to learn and this is right and this is wrong, they’re terrified of being wrong. What’s more there is a high chance that your students simply do not understand you. Exceptional readers and proficient writers as they are, these students are the result of a system wherein vocabulary is memorized and shouted back and forth. Memorizing Shakespeare’s plays is considered to be the best way to learn English because, after all is Shakespeare not the master of the English language? (Again, this fact was brought up in the TEFL course and I’ve found many of its nuggets of wisdom to be lacking in the authenticity department.) For these reasons I came to forgive myself for my atrocious first class (though I would understand if my students have not) and I came to see that my co-workers really are the best resource available.

The classes have calmed down in my company as they’ve gotten more used to me and their work has noticeably improved over the course of these seven weeks. I also think that they have become more attuned to my accent which is more or less the only thing I have to offer over a fully qualified teacher. That said, the moment I realised that I was probably going to be OK over here for my year abroad was when I sat down in front of my second listening class and a voiced called out You are really handsome!

Why yes I am, and we’re going to get along just fine. We have, too. Class 03 are brilliant. I suspect the cat-caller, was King, a shameless and enthusiastic student. Back then she was just a voice in a crowd.

I learned quickly to adapt my classes, living in adamant fear of one of my classes running short again and the agonizing embarrassment that that entails. By my third listening class I was using all of the tricks that my co-workers had told me about. To my introductory lecture about myself I had added two slides, one for each of my sisters. It will be the easiest class you teach Ethan imparted They just like looking at pictures of white people, we fascinate them. Elder sister Lucy, my students now know is a fencing instructor. She likes physical activity and (controversially enough) spending time with her friends. Annie is another wacky character who likes reading books and going hiking. She is studying to be an architect. 

They’re shy so they won’t like talking about themselves Sam had told me Get them to work in pairs and then ask them to introduce each other. Strangely enough, the three students that I asked to introduce their partners refused and talked about themselves instead. They keep you on your toes.

Despite shameless filibustering and excessive slow talking my third class also had a baggy ten minutes before the break so I followed Amy’s advice Games, play lots of games. They love Pictionary. So Pictionary we played. I went to the whiteboard and, knowing how exciting they found kilts I etched a hairy highlander on the whiteboard and drew an arrow pointing at his sporran. The class roared with laughter and silence fell. So, what is it? I asked. A girl nodded, yeah she knew It’s, I forgot the word. It’s the skirt. Fair enough, I wrote the word kilt on the whiteboard. Who is next? I asked, there was some twitching and some murmuring. I rephrased Who would like to draw something on the board for us next? One girl, clearly the resident artist (I now know her well as Judy) was elected to participate by the gazes of her peers. Giggling she drew a little bespectacled man with a quiff and a tartan kilt. Stephen in a kilt, it wasn’t quite the leap of imagination that I had been hoping for but at least we all got to laugh warmly together at the notion of teacher wearing a skirt.

The girls can be utterly shameless in their collective catcalling in direct contrast to their manner when asked a question individually before the class. They have established a curious mythology around myself and the Peace Corps boys to the point where we barely recognize their descriptions of us. I think in their minds there’s no difference between Sam, Ethan and Stephen and One Direction or George Harrison, Paul McCartney and John Lennon (I guess that makes Callum Ringo.) They have their little sayings about all of us as though concocted simultaneously through a Hive mind. So Tall, So Handsome! They say of me, Stephen You Are Cute, So Tall So Handsome. Apparently this chant is an inherited one as Ethan was once So Tall, So Handsome. Now that he has grown his hair and beard he is So Handsome, An Artist! The students insist against all contradiction from him that he is An Artist whether or not he has skills with a paintbrush or guitar. Sam, much to his bewilderment is So Shy, So Handsome. I don’t get it, he told me I just talk to them normally like Ethan does but they insist I’m shy! Still, If I could be known as shy and handsome; a handsome artist or tall and handsome the latter isn’t a bad one to be. It plays havoc on the ego.

Chiang Mai Chatter

Thailand is to China as Spain is to Great Britain. It’s where the richer families go on holiday, it’s where the retirees go to live out their golden years. Due to the low income of many Chinese citizens, especially in the area where we live, if they leave China at all in their lives then it will be to go to South Korea or Thailand. The Qiannan Normal University must have a partnership with a university in Thailand because a couple of students who were lucky enough to study abroad studied there. My impressions of Bangkok were not stellar, it was dusty, polluted and the roads were packed but if I ever got the opportunity to retire abroad, Chiang Mai would be a decent choice of location.

The ex-pat community is bustling there, a couple of our coworkers - a couple - escaped the ice-chill of a Duyun Winter to stay in the Chiang Mai area over Christmas. They rented an apartment, enjoyed chilling by the pool with relaxing music and enjoyed the relative (to Guizhou) luxury of a Thai hospital as they brought a new baby into the world (word up to Sadie Grace). They weren’t the only foreigners there either. Our hostel was co-owned by a Canadian, a Brit and a local Thai partner. The manager who we got to know the best was the Canadian, a nice man who lived what looked like a completely carefree life. He knew everything about the local area, right down to which bar Callum could be kicked out of for asking the wrong person about weed. He lived the life that all Suits pertain to dream of, shorts, sandals, beard, pot belly and all.

For us, perhaps the most incredible thing about being in South East Asia was the ease of life and nowhere was this clearer than in Chiang Mai. The tourism industry is perhaps the biggest source of income for the area. Anyone who can scrub a shoe or drive a red bus is benefiting from the constant stream of travellers. As a holidaymaker you are spoiled for choice with hostels, bars and transportation to your next destination. We were taken aback when we made it into CM in the late afternoon of our second day out of Duyun, walked to the nearest travel agent’s and got three tickets for the hotel, bus and boat trip from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang in Laos leaving the very next day. The hostel itself was loaded with enough flyers for local attractions to keep even the most picky traveller busy for weeks. And, for the lazy they simply had to ask any receptionist on duty what to do the next day and they would have a day of activities and transportation booked within the next ten minutes plus discount thanks to their encyclopedic knowledge of opportunities and phone numbers. The hostels were allowed to offer discounts to customers as a kind of finders fee, you were rewarded for being lazy. What a country - what a depressingly desperate and exploited people. Hail Britannia.

The temperament of Chiang Mai is far more relaxed and cool than its energetic sister, Bangkok. Being further North, the sandal-melting heat is replaced with a modest breeze and cosy, shorts-friendly warmth. The urban area is nestled neatly behind three sides of a square moat which makes navigation easier for the hapless traveller, just go that way until you reach water and go round until you see something you recognise. There are also religious sites a-plenty for the enthusiastic temple-hopper. One of the best days we had together featured a walk from the hostel in the direction which was vaguely opposite to the moat. Each street corner had some attraction or other, from strange, trinket baring museum to majestic golden Buddhist temples.

One of the most striking things about these temples, besides their extravagant number was the extravagance of their architecture and interior design. After the wonder wore off at the sight of the stone exteriors, wrought into such unbelievable designs one was then taken aback by the munificent Buddha head which stretched for feet upon feet up into the ceiling. The chamber would have been crammed with wandering tourists were said interior not so massive. The other thing that was massive was the lavish donations box which would have comfortably fit a Callum and a Stephen. It shadowed over what, to my foggy memories looked like tiny battered suitcase with a slit in the top, plain and inconspicuous in contrast to its lavish companion. The suitcase was for the money to donate to the poor, the donations box was for money to go to the temple. Victor Hugo could have filled a good thousand pages with my thoughts on that. The other thing about the Chiang Mai temples which rubbed me up the wrong way was the men’s pavilion - no chicks, it demanded, they dirty. I did go in, but on principle I thought it was shit. We had coffee and I wrote postcards to console myself.

Look, a mango tree.

We found a lot of good spots to relax in Chiang Mai, it came at the midpoint of our holiday and after many days of flights, cruises and bumpy bus rides in ovens it was nice to put a few days aside for nothing. There is a large cluster of hostels and restaurants near to the moat and we found it easy to locate numerous spots to enjoy drinks and Pad Thai. One of the nicest places we found was a garden cafe sheltered by overhanging trees. It also had a comfortable hammock perfect for reading the Kindle and overhearing every word of your friends’ intense conversation. The coffee in Thailand is great, especially after living in China. Of course South East Asia is a hot-spot for coffee production, Cambodian blends are delicious. There was even, and I was amazed to see this, a Starbucks 3 stories high in the square. I visited for the sake of novelty (I hadn’t seen one in four months) and was happily reminded what it felt like to spend three pounds on a cup of muggy brown water. I didn’t go back. Well, I did enter the Bangkok Starbucks but I really needed to use the facilities.

Thailand is also a great location to receive a Thai massage. I went along one day to get my feet done which was extremely pleasant, like walking on marshmallows. I think I made the right decision too as Callum and Aimee emerged from their beds with the look of shell-shocked bombing survivors. My rule is, don’t touch me above the kneecaps and we’ll get on fine. If more people in the world followed my rules it would be a far more boring, introverted and safer place. The following day I went back to our friendly masseuse for a foot scrub. I needed it, Trump had just moved into the White House and was waging his one-man war on intelligence and common sense.

A major part of the hosteling experience is getting to meet new people, whether you want to or not. Even I, who could quite happily remain silent for a good month and a half, got to speak to a few new people. During each stage of our journey we met an interesting person travelling which who conveniently fit into three separate posts. As we were travelling in a group of three we would often end up sharing a room with one outsider. In Chiang Mai we met, lets call him, Harriet. Harriet had left university in the States and was going to take up a position in a financial firm in New York but he was taking six months out to see the world before sticking his nose to the grindstone. He was nice, an ex-American Football player, casual weed smoker and bore a resemblance to Tom Hardy. A less grizzled Tom Hardy, perhaps. He was placed in our room and on his first night was regaled by Callum about the merits of recreational marijuana imbibement. He invited himself along on our adventures for a couple of days and no-one minded too much, Aimee who is a fan of the American University lifestyle was positively thrilled to have an insider to talk to about it with.

The Chiang Mai area has a number of beautiful, natural sites turned into fiendishly chargeable tourist hot-spots. We visited a deep lake surrounded on all sides by heavily excavated cliff faces. The place had deck chairs, an expensive cafe and a cliff for jumping off. It had also, amusingly, been named The Grand Canyon, though I’ve seen grander, even if it was only pictures on a Google search. It amounted to little more than an outdoor swimming pool but Callum, Aimee and Harriet did get to jump off the cliff. I got to eat watermelon and struggle with Terry Pratchett’s convoluted prose style.

Chiang Mai is the home of the Doi Suthep, a vast hill which would take the best part of a day to climb. It is topped with a spiritual temple/ visitor centre and Harriet recommended we go there to watch the sunset. We took one of the red busses, like taxis but with fewer seat-belts and available to any number of strangers travelling in a similar direction. As with any of the services in this part of the world, the price was open to negotiation so we were lucky that Harriet was not the sort of man to take shit from a red bus driver. Our journey to the temple was winding, fast and uncomfortable but it was preferable to the journey back. Our driver, who had made us wait for about twenty minutes until his cab was full (it was the end of the day after all) stopped half way down the hill on the side of what amounted to a pavement-less dual-carriageway. “This is where the real view is!” He told us. “Get out, come and see!” Something smelled fishy so we just stayed in the bus until he gave up trying to wheedle more money out of us and we went back into the city.

On our final night, once Harriet had departed, we decided to go to the safari. The location had come highly recommend and even though we weren’t quite sure what the place offered we hired a minivan and it drove us far out of the city to the safari. Much like Disneyland or any other family day-out centre it was packed with statues, entertainers and that eerie sense of falseness. There were shows all around including a rodeo-style event in the main courtyard. The Thai performers threw historical accuracy to the wind combining traditional Eastern dancing women with lasso-wielding, stetson-wearing blokes. One of them even got to ride a horse, I think he was in charge. The fire displays and cracking whips were almost too terrifying to bare. The performers were not separated from the audience by anything other than a few feet so one was made hopelessly aware of the potential for any small child to wrestle themselves free of their parent’s arms and find their way in front of a disfiguring danger.

As with any attraction featuring performing animals the Safari seemed quite appealing on paper. I had my phone out and was excitedly recording the fact that Aimee, Callum and I still had faces, that we were sitting in an audience and that we were about to watch a lion show. When said lions were brought out, however looking emaciated, threadbare and forced to do humiliating tricks for scraps of meat I put the camera away, thinking that I’d really rather no one knew that I had financially supported the creatures’ evidently unpleasant lifestyle. The best part of the experience was the actual safari. We were packed into plastic chairs on charming busses and we got to squint out through the dark night at zebras, giraffes and all manner of furry beasties. We bought vegetable to feed them but I got a bit overexcited throwing them unsuccessfully to some far-off bears and didn’t have any left when we came up close and personal to some deer and a zebra who was eating out of people’s hands. It’s like the old Aesop’s Fable of the boy who threw away his carrots and didn’t have any left to feed a zebra which he wanted to do. It’s uncanny, actually.

Chiang Mai also offers tourists the opportunity to watch people beat the ever-living shit out of each other in a local form of boxing. Every day matches were advertised with faces of people you’ve never heard of plastered on flyers around the city. We went along one night because we were in Chiang Mai and it’s a thing that you do when you’re in Chiang Mai. The whole event was quite impressive with live music playing during each fight and crowds of loud people getting steadily drunker match after match. The music was played with a type of reed-instrument that sounds a bit like the thing you’d expect a snake-charmer to play so it all felt very cultural. I enjoyed the not-so-open bar and laughed about how seriously everyone was taking the over-glorified punch ups much to the chagrin of my neighbour, a sweaty American who was appreciating the artistry on display. In the end the night was cut short because a fighter was knocked unconscious. I had a headache in the morning and it served me right.

 One of my favourite memories from Chiang Mai involved a group of noisy, inconsiderate youths and Aimee and Stephen not enjoying conversation about sex and drugs taking place loudly outside of their thin bedroom walls. We had come back from a day of something and aforementioned crowd had set up camp in the restaurant area right next to our bedroom window. Aimee and I had tried to relax in our beds but the noise was unbearable so we decided to sit on the patio outside the main entrance. I left my sandals in the room because I didn’t intend to be walking very far. Aimee called her mother and I relaxed with a book or some YouTube videos (that detail has unfortunately been lost to history.) A good hour passed and there was no change in the volume of the party so we stayed. It was irritating but we dealt with the inconvenience stoically. The hours kept passing, however and the bawdy conversation got, if anything, even louder. Eventually I vented some frustration by emphatically lying that if it didn’t stop I would be complaining tomorrow, moving hostels and asking for my deposit back. Immediately our Canadian host shot out of the front doors and told the group off loudly and without room for question. (He was clearly well practised in the art.) Aimee and I realised that the party would soon be leaving the comfort of the restaurant and would see us sitting there, the only people who could have complained. We ran out the gate, down the street and went for a nice, brisk walk through the city at night. We were like little kids running away from bullies because they had got them into trouble with the teacher. And I still wasn’t wearing any shoes.

Chiang Mai is truly worth your time. The hosteling experience wouldn’t be complete without friendly cities like Chiang Mai to soak up your time. There’s plenty of bars and clubs for late night revellers and plenty of hotels, museums and temples for the more distinguished travellers. It served us well for a good six days but we could have been contented staying there for even more time. Next up… (hopefully not in three months…) Laos.