Created At 2025-10-14 • #Notion

My New Concept English

The articles come from my personal experience.

The tour to Xiangtan

Last Saturday, I went to Xiangtan City.

The public transport in Xiangtan is not very developed. While there are many bus routes, there aren’t many actual buses running on road. So, I had to call a taxi to go everywhere.

Qi Baishi, the artist who is famous for his shrimp paintings, was born there. Unfortunately, there were only duplicated pieces rather than his real masterpieces in his memorial hall.

Overall, Xiangtan is not a great place for traveling.

Besides, I found an interesting thing about the public education there. The stories of many good people are posted indoors to promote their virtues and encourage everyone to be a kind person.

In Changsha, it is the opposite. You can see public awareness slogans warning people not to be drug dealers or not to harm minors everywhere in that city.

The Chengbei Church

Last Sunday, I went to church. It was Chengbei Church, close to the Wenchangge metro station. I arrived there at 2:30 PM and left at 4:00 PM. I sat in the right back corner and observed the people.

At the beginning, people stood up, singing the hymns. When my legs were almost giving out, we were asked to sit down and listen to the story from the Bible. To be honest, I didn’t understand the pastor’s logic at all. It sounded like he was persuading us to believe in God for no reason. He said many people came to church with a specific goal, such as praying for an ideal partner. “Yes, so did I,” I said in my mind.

The girl who sat next to me looked like she was my age. However, when the service ended, she left the chair as soon as possible before I even had a chance to say hello.

I won’t go to church again.

The tour to Xinxiang

A couple of days ago, I was traveling in Xinxiang City.

My phone was running low on battery in the afternoon. So, I went into a Xiaomi store and asked if I could charge it. The seller said yes. I was sitting there, waiting for the charging to finish.

Suddenly, a customer came in and started talking with the seller. “How do your phones compare with OPPO or VIVO?” he asked. “Lei Jun is not a profit-pursuing businessman; he’s aligned with Mr. YuDonglai, you know?”

When I heard that, I really had to try not to laugh. You have to understand that the emergency exits at Pang Dong Lai Supermarket even have physical handles!

The scam

I was planning to travel to Yunnan from Chengdu.

Based on my twenty-plus years in the eastern part of the country, I’ve found that the train is usually the only way when you need to travel to a neighboring province. This is because the bus takes too much time, and the distance is too short for a direct flight.

So, I bought a train ticket from Chengdu to Dali City without thinking too much. After that, I realized something was wrong. I checked the route and found that the train would first go to Guizhou and then enter Yunnan, which meant a huge, unnecessary detour.

Selling a full-route ticket like that feels like a complete scam! Finally, I canceled that ticket at the cost of a 5% service fee and bought a plane ticket to Dali City instead.

The tour to Lijiang

If you have the chance to go to Lijiang, I strongly recommend you to visit Lanyue Valley. It is a small creek formed by melted snow from the mountains. When the sun is shining, the water shows different shades of blue, from deep to light.

While I was watching the pretty landscape, a man walked toward me. The camera with a massive lens hanging around his neck told me he was a photographer. He was followed by a bride whose face looked so utterly foul, like she’d just stepped in yak dung. The groom was reluctantly following the two of them.

This was the best scene I saw on the whole trip.

The Beizhengjie Church

Well, I guess I broke my word. I ended up going to church again last Sunday. This time it was the Beizhengjie Church.

An old lady told me about her story. She said she had a brilliant son who was working for the railway company. Then disaster struck out of nowhere. After she had prayed for three days, God saved her son.

And she had another story of faith. Her brother, too, got injured in a separate serious accident. Thanks to God, he wasn’t hurt as badly as the other people involved.

Then, moving on to her personal health, she shared that she had a surgery on her vocal cords, and the Lord’s protection ensured her recovery was pretty good.

She bought an old house in Changsha. After she cleaned the house, it looked much better than the price she paid would suggest. That’s definitely a gift from God, in her opinion.

I was actually starting to feel a little impatient, but I didn’t interrupt her just to be polite. Instead, a question was forming in my mind: “Why would God allow disaster to strike in first place?”

The nightmare

I had an exhausting nightmare all night.

I was walking through a park when four black puppies ran up to me and started circling me. An old man was following them. Bizarrely, the path behind him was a dead end. With nowhere else to go, I had to follow the old man.

I walked for a bit with my flashlight on until I saw the entrance to a tunnel and an old car parked next to it.

The old man said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve hunted a werewolf.” So we drove into the tunnel. The scenery inside the tunnel started to change, turning into a street view that looked like it was from an early 20th-century period piece.

The old man said, “I’m going to step out for a moment. You should not leave the car.”

There were a few lone people on the street. They started approaching me after the old man had left. I got scared and drove the car right into them, sending them flying. These people were actually moving dolls; their heads and bodies were connected by springs. Suddenly, one of the dolls’ faces twisted and started to look angry.

The old man came back to the car just in time. “Go! Don’t look back! We should be given preferential treatment as hunters, but there are no werewolves here anymore,” the old man said as he calmly drove away.

The street scenery on both sides disappeared, and it changed back into the dark tunnel. I could feel a shadowy presence chasing us. Before we escaped the tunnel, two of the dogs jumped out of the car and started fighting with the shadow.

Finally, the two of us and the remaining two dogs made it back to “the real world.”

The Moment of Clarity

I met a young man in church. It was around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, after most people had left. He was sitting beside the door and talking with the preacher.

After the preacher had left as well, he started to talk with me. “Why are you here?” He asked. “I just want to make some friends. I am kind of an outsider here in the city.” I replied. But he wasn’t really buying my answer. Instead, he insisted that I must have something weighing on my mind. “Maybe you’re right.” I didn’t dwell on the topic for too long.

He was so enthusiastic about telling his story to me. One of his hobbies is vocal music. “I had never even dared to dream of it, you know, until God told me that I could make it.” He said. At the beginning his father didn’t support him pursuing his dream. The father compromised finally and provided financial support. In my opinion, that’s not because his negotiation worked, but simply because he’s the only son.

He complained about the way that the believers nowadays preach. “Believe in Jesus to an endless living”, they would say to someone, but young people won’t be touched by these silly slogans. “So, I insist on sharing my stories, letting them see what a Christian life can be like”.

So he had been preaching to me the whole time!

The Martyrs Park

I went to the Matchmaking Corner in Martyrs Park. There were many seniors exchanging information, looking just like secret agents exchanging codes. I heard that because someone got scammed in the past, the park management no longer allows people to post personal ads there.

On a small path, I saw an engaged couple taking wedding photos. The lady was wearing a Qipao, and gentleman was in a Tang suit. The man actually looked quite decent, but his buzz cut was terrible. The whole vibe looked like “a wealthy heiress falling in love with a gangster.”

The McDonald’s inside the park didn’t have any value meals; I guess that’s because it’s a tourist spot.The martyrs shed their blood in vain.