December 2007 Journal
Christmas In China (and a lot of other stuff too!) - Thursday December 27, 2007Wow, it's been a long time since I've updated. The last month in China has definitely been the best so far.
I'm adjusted pretty well. I've got my little city all figured out, I know which buses go where, I know a lot of the major streets by name, and I'm almost finished with my first semester of teaching.
So, to sum up most of the major things happening lately:
The people around me are great. Kellen and I have been spending even more time together lately (is that possible?) and we're getting along great. His girlfriend, Megrez, is here from Oregon to visit during the holiday season. I thinks she's staying until the end of January, and she livens things up, too. (Also, it's funny to see how she reacts to things in China, because I've been here long enough now that there's no surprising me at all. Seriously. Aliens could land, World War 3 could start, and we could cure cancer, and I'd just say, "Nice." Nobody can surprise me.) There's that German girl named Anne who I really like, too. The four of us together have some kind of complementary social dynamic that I'm comfortable with. It makes me miss my friends back home a lot.
Christmas! Christmas was a hard day to be away from my family and home. I was a little homesick, but I was alright. Christmas Eve, we had a big party in my upstairs kitchen. We watched Die Hard (it takes place during the holiday season), we had a lot of food, a little tree, tons of alcohol, and even some gifts. I had a great time!
Christmas Day, I was exhausted and I had to teach a class. After class, Kellen, Megrez, and I went to Century Mart to shop for scooters. We attracted a crowd of 20 people who wanted to watch the crazy foreigners test drive a scooter around. We bought them! They're the same model. Two awesome electric scooters to cruise around town. They go 40 km/h, they're rechargeable, and I feel so excited STILL about cruising around on a scooter in China.
Having a scooter here is awesome. Suddenly, the random traffic makes a little more sense. I can't express how therapeutic it is to honk at people. For six months, they've been honking at me with no rhyme or reason. People honk. It feels good to honk back. I can get places faster than on the bus. There's a newer area of the city with very little traffic. The grocery store there is practically abandoned (well, at least not shoulder-to-shoulder people like all of the others), so now I can get there in a reasonable amount of time without waiting for the slooooow #14 bus.
I love my scooter. It's probably a good thing that I didn't buy it sooner. It makes me appreciate having it a lot more. Cruising my scooter with Anne on the back with Kellen and Megrez in tow is awesome. And going with the flow of Chinese bike traffic around town is exhilerating.
I broke up with Nancy... kind of. She had a serious boyfriend who she stopped dating back in July. He's been hassling her to get back together with him. He loves her but she doesn't love him. He saw she and I together and got jealous, so he called Nancy's parents to tell them that their daughter was hanging out with a foreigner. Her parents called her and, together with her ex's parents, talked to their children about who they should be dating (i.e., each other!). Nancy wrote me a big letter telling me that she couldn't see me anymore because she was going to get back together with her ex-boyfriend to try to get their lost love back. She came over, gave me the letter, and left. About three hours later, she called me crying and yelling at me in Chinese. (You think Chinese is hard to understand, try listening to a Southwest dialect coming from a crying girl!) She told me that it was a huge mistake, that all the unhappiness in her life stems from her ex-boyfriend, and that she wanted me to pretend like nothing ever happened between us. I let her cool down for two days and then we talked about what we would do. I told her that I think her feelings for me far outpaced my feelings for her and that it wasn't fair for me to string her along with no intention to marry her. (Marry her!! I knew her for 3 months and she's ready to marry me!) I told her that if she doesn't love her ex-boyfriend, that's for her to work out, but that I couldn't be in the picture. Long story in a nutshell: we're not going to see each other again. I never expected her to fall in love with me so quickly just from cooking with me, bowling with me, and watching movies with me a few times a week for a few months. We were very casual about our relationship, there was almost no physical contact, and I was honest up front about how I expected things to be between us. I guess it's just another cultural lesson that I can take with me. I'm a little excited to date someone back in the U.S. when I return home because there, I can understand everything again. (Or at least pretend to.)
Teaching is still going well. My students like me and I have a lot of fun in class. Not much to report there.
Time for dinner! I need to make more time to write on this blog... but I get so busy living my life in China that I forget to record it. :)
Thanksgiving, LAN Parties, Bowling ... wait, am I still in China? - Tuesday December 4, 2007
Thanksgiving was pretty great. We trained over to Nanjing and met up with other Americans for a nice Thanksgiving meal. We bought our turkey thinking it would be 93 rmb total - turns out it was 93 rmb / kilogram. We paid about 700rmb for a 7kg turkey. (It was a big turkey, but so expensive!) It's always surprising to me to see what's more expensive here than at home. For instance, I can walk 10 minutes out my front door and buy a live chicken, have it beheaded, feathered, and gutted for about three dollars. But the turkey cost a hundred.
Anyway, we had a big turkey, some mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, red wine, and two pumpkin pies. 7 Americans, 2 Chinese, a lazy afternoon, and WAY too much turkey make for a pretty great day. We were all so comatose after dinner that we could only muster a short hop over to the Carrefour before we gave up, went to the train station, and laid around the waiting lobby for 2 hours until our train came home.
I went to the intenet cafe near campus for a Monday afternoon and spent about 7 hours playing Counterstrike, Warcraft 3, and Day of Defeat. I had so much fun there that I decided to pull an all-nighter during the weekend playing video games. For 20 rmb (or about $2.50), you can get a computer for 12 hours loaded with all your favorite games. I went over around 8 p.m. on Friday night and stayed until Saturday morning. I went with Justin, Emil, Joye, Joye's girlfriend, and about 3 other Chinese people who I didn't really know. Around 10:30, Joye's whole crew bailed out, and around 1:30, Justin bailed out. Emil and I were the only two who lasted all night. When the sun came up, we wandered out of the cafe and took a bus home, tired and hungry. I slept all morning and into the afternoon.
The man on campus who used to have my boss's job called me to ask if I'd be willing to meet Joye, an ex-student of his who has an online company. All they would tell me is that they needed some assistance from a foreigner who knew something about computers and video games. (Bingo.) It turns out they have a company selling farmed gold to online gamers, and their target market is players in the U.S. They wanted my help editing their really-terribly-written website and they wanted my advice on which games were popular in the U.S. I was a little angry because the right Google search could have answered 90% of their questions, but I gave them some advice and they bought me the most expensive, worst tasting cup of coffee I've ever had.
I was supposed to go to Changzhou to give a speech at a convention. That's exactly what my boss asked me to do: go to Changzhou to give a short speech at a convention. She said I'd get paid for it... not a lot, but enough to interest me. The day before we were to go, she called me to her office to "discuss the details." Turns out that first, it wasn't a convention but a class arranged at a company whose manager is friends with some teacher on campus. The class wasn't a one-time thing, but a six-week-long thing. I wasn't "giving a short speech" as much as "teaching a 3 hour class." My boss expected me to go to Changzhou and teach for 3 hours about conversational English without knowing in advance. She didn't think I would need to prepare anything, and she thought 150 rmb would be way more than sufficient (that's about $6 / hour for the actual teaching, disregarding travel time, which would be one hour each way ).
I was angry that she flat-out lied to me about what it was and that she was being (what I considered to be) so disrespectful. I know I'm living in a different culture where, in every single experience I've had so far, people are far less organized than what I'm accustomed to. But come on!
Anyway, I put my anger aside and just blamed cultural difference for my frustration. I agreed to go and she said she'd pick me up the next day at 7:00 a.m. I left Kellen's birthday party really early so I could get to bed so I could be well-rested for my day teaching steel workers conversational English. Well, I was up, dressed, and ready to go at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. She didn't show. At 7:30, I tried calling her repeatedly but she didn't pick up her phone. Finally, at 8:15, she called to tell me that we might be leaving later, "maybe" 10:00. (She says "maybe" for everything, and it drives me crazy. I like yes and no answers.) Then she said we'd actually leave after lunch and just teach for 3 hours in the afternoon.
I couldn't believe the gall she had. I told her I wouldn't go. I told her a rude no without even offering an excuse. (Apparently you should offer an excuse for EVERY instance where you want to say "no". It's less rude to lie to someone than to be direct about not wanting to do something for them.) She apologized and said that she understood, then she asked me for the phone numbers of other foreigners I know who might want to go. I told her I didn't know any.
My boss at the summer program I taught at up in Huai'an had the same disorganized habits. One Saturday, he called me at 8:00 a.m. wondering why I didn't attend my 7:00 a.m. class - I thought I had weekends off and I didn't, but he had never told me. Another time, he didn't bother to tell me that a Wednesday was a holiday until I arrived to the school at 7:00 a.m. I'm not sure if the communication barrier leads to a lack of telling me what's going on or if Chinese society in general puts less emphasis on organization and information. I get no information about anything ever. It drives me a little nuts! I like to think that my supervisors truly are organized and they just don't communicate the details to me very well because they're shy about the language barrier. But in reality, I think they're just truly less organized - another cultural difference that I try to understand, but can't help feeling frustrated over on occassion.
Nancy and I have been cooking a lot together lately. I made her some potato skillets. (Diced up potatoes fried with onions, peppers, and garlic - topped with some cheese, some hollandaise sauce, and a fried egg with fresh tomatoes.) She loved it! We made tacos and she loved them too. I'm going to get her addicted to Western food if I'm not careful. I didn't know I would miss food so much. Chinese food is pretty good, but every dish is very similar to the other dishes. In general, everything is very salty and oily. (At least here in the Jiangsu province.) I know Sichuan has more spicy food, the South has more dumplings, and the North has more steamed food. I eat a lot of dumplings, but it's hard to find good Sichuan food and good steamed buns here. I'm also a little afraid of eating the most delicious food because it comes from street vendors at the night market. Last time I ate there, I got a really nasty stomach flu. I've been sticking to boring cafeteria food lately to try to keep healthy. (It's working - lately I've been feeling great!)
Nancy and I also went bowling together. I thought I was a pretty good bowler, so I told her I'd beat her really badly. Well, I forgot about my little thumb surgery a few years ago, and my right thumb is still too fat to fit into a bowling ball hole. I pretty much bowled with only my fingers in the ball. It was hard! Long story short - I won the first game but she won the second two. A little boy stole her bowling ball, it was too heavy, and when he tried to bowl with it, he fell on his face! I felt bad for laughing until I saw that Nancy was cracking up, too. I'm glad she shares my dark sense of humor. After bowling, we came home and watched movies because it was raining outside.
I've never had rain in December before. It was cold, wet, and a little miserable. I miss snow. This will be my first winter without snow.
Here's a funny picture of me losing at bowling. I'm making my victory signs even though I'm frowning:
Besides Nancy, I've been spending a lot of time with Emil. He's one of my students and we have a lot in common. I really like hanging out with him. We played Monopoly together and we've been to the internet cafe together twice to play video games. He's the one who stayed all night with me there on Friday. I've also been hanging out with Kellen a lot (nothing new there!) and the German girl Anne. I'm really sad she won't be here next semester - seeing her is always a highlight in my day. I guess the good news is that a girl from Texas my age is coming to teach at the University next semester, and she also loves reading and seems like she has a lot of interesting things to talk about. (I chatted with her online tonight in Gmail.)
It's been a long time since I updated - I'll write more soon about the speech competition I attended. It was hilarious.