The July 2007 Blog
(good ol' blog style - newest info on top, scroll down for the old stuff.)Trying to Stay Cool in Shanghai - Tuesday July 31st, 2007
Scroll down for the pics link - I'm not going to lie, I haven't posted any new ones. I haven't even tried! This time, I just plain forgot to bring my camera to the internet cafe with me. Oops! :)
Shanghai is an amazing city. I took the subway downtown the other day and explored the area near the Shanghai Financial area. (Not the Bund, not the Pearl Tower, but an area close to there.) You can buy absolutely anything that you might need. I found a voltage converter to step 220v down to 110v and a set of plug converters. On the streets, you can buy Prada bags, Rolex watches, the new Harry Potter book, and a ton of other rip-off name-brand stuff for really cheap. Everybody sees that I'm a foreigner, and they say, "Hello, hello, lookie look lookie look!" They also sell software and DVD's of movies that are still in the theater! I almost bought Transformers, but then realized I don't have a DVD player yet.
I went to a nice tea house yesterday with another American that I met at my hostel. His name is Mark and he's just finishing a year-long stint as a teacher in China, so he's got some great advice for me. At the tea house, you just pay a little to get in, then everything you want to drink is included. I had real, hot coffee, jasmine tea, milk tea, soda, a sprite float, and a bowl of vanilla ice cream. We played chess and just hung out. Later we found a ping pong table, foosball, and a pool table. We had a good ol' fashioned night of American-style fun.
I bought two new shirts for 19 yuan each. That's about $2.50! They're handsome and made from very thin material - they'll keep me cool on these amazingly hot streets of Shanghai. I've only been wearing sandals, shorts, and light shirts. Socks, pants, and normal thick shirts are out of the question here - I already got heat stroke once, I don't need it again!
Riding the subway and exploring the city just by walking up and down side streets is a lot of fun. I found a small "mall" type place the other day that had 5 stories of clothing stores designed for Chinese teenagers. I was excited to see what's "fashionable" and "cool" here. Basically, it's the same thing that's cool for 8 year old girls in America to wear. Chinese boys dress like American little girls. :)
The deli section of the grocery store will make lunch for me. I can order fried rice and they cook it up with veggies, eggs, and sauce right in front of me, then I just pay by the kg. The deli section has a lot of good pre-made food that's fun to eat because everything has a different surprise in the middle. Will this pastry be meat? Is it sweet bean paste? Uncooked potatoes?? Who knows? Lunch everyday is like random pastry roulette, and I love it!
Kirsten will probably be landing on Thursday evening. I'm so excited to see her!! All these cool experiences and adventures I have have been so ... personal to me. This is MY adventure, and I barely remember to put 10% of the stories here on my blog. I'm excited to have someone else around who I know so that I can share my stories and some new experiences with her! I want everybody to see how exciting, interesting, and crazy China is. I get to pick her up for the airport, and for a few weeks, we get to be lovers in Shanghai, like something from a romantic movie! :)
Welcome to Shanghai! - Sunday July 29th, 2007
I swear, next time I will have NEW photos... but for now: Still the Old Photos - as early as tomorrow, this link will point to NEW photos!
I just looked up the biggest cities in the world and found that there is no general consensus on the order. No matter how they're stacked, Shanghai falls in between 4th and 8th with just under 20 million people. It is one of THE major population centers in the world. And holy cow, it is BIG!
I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil once for 2 months. It was huge but pretty dirty. I think half of its population was living in slums in houses made by leaning wooden pallets against each other. In Shanghai, though, it looks as if the entire population is living in tall, thin apartment buildings that canvas the entire landscape and skyline! The city is relatively clean for its size, and from what I've seen in just 48 hours, very developed and modern!
I'm staying at a hostel for a week before Kirsten comes out to stay 2 weeks with me at a real hotel. A hostel... what can I say about it? Too many people from too many places invading each other's privacy. A guy from Hong Kong won't shut up long enough to let me fall asleep. A guy from France is so annoying that he has to offer to buy people's meals for them so that he can have dinner company. My room also has the stereotypical European hippy-world-traveler girl with massive dreadlocks, hairy legs, and are those sandals?? Nope, just her FEET! I shouldn't be such a cheap bastard, next time I'm paying for a hotel!
Ah well, across the street from my hostel is a 2 yuan / hour internet cafe. I dig it - the machines are fast and they have a USB port! I'll bring my camera back here soon and upload more pictures to the Picasa album.
I'm also just up the street from a Carrefour - a big, cheap grocery store that sells a ton of Western things! (Holy cow, they have gin there. I'm stocking up before I head to Zhenjiang!) A new addition to the seafood death row area of the grocery store: bullfrogs! Live bullfrogs just sitting in a tank at the store waiting for someone to stab them and make them into food. Bullfrogs, turtles, fish, eels, crayfish, crabs, lobsters... all in big water tanks just waiting to be purchased and eaten! I kind of wish the food was that fresh in American stores. Can you imagine picking out a chicken that was still clucking and watching the store clerk behead and defeather that bad boy?!
The last night in Huai'an, we had a small party with our classes. I went to my favorite class and the students were doing the funniest stuff! One student was the M.C. and he was in charge of calling on other students to perform. When he made you get up, you had to either sing a song, tell a story, or do something interesting! At my turn, I sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." I didn't remember all the words - oops! A lot of them sang songs or told funny stories. They gave me a ton of food and I had a great time seeing them be themselves.
The bus from Huai'an to Shanghai was really nice. I had more space than on my flight to China! They played some Chinese movie that was pretty good (but that I slept through), and then they played the Matrix, in English, with Chinese subtitles. The ride from start to finish was about 5 hours. When we got to Shanghai, I said goodbye to Gregory and Karen and I headed for the metro.
I got to my metro stop without a problem. But when I came out of the metro station, I went the wrong direction on a street and ended up lugging all of my stuff (two suitcases and a backpack) around downtown Shanghai for 2 hours in the HEAT trying to find my hostel. The directions for finding the hostel online were terrible. Finally, I ended up back where I started, went a different direction, and found the hostel. The accomodations - well, I already complained about those, but what did I expect for $3 / night?
This afternoon, I'm making another trip to the grocery store and then I'm going to explore this cool side street that I came across yesterday. I'm trying to not do any of the touristy things in Shanghai because I'll have plenty of time for that with Kirsten when she arrives in 5 days. 5 days!! I'm really excited for that. When she gets here, I'll have been in China for a full month. I'm practically Zhong Guo Ren by now! :)
Done in Huai'an, Moving to Shanghai - Thursday July 26th, 2007
Someday, a USB connection in China will work - but until then, feast on this: Still the Old Photos - when I get to Shanghai, I'll upload new ones! (Perhaps?)
This morning was my last time teaching in Huai'an. I had been teaching 4 classes in the morning from 7:10 - 11:15, then I was going to my second school for 4 more classes in the afternoons from 2:00 - 5:30. I've been busy! But now I'm done... last day of school! And I now realize why my teachers used to tell me that the last day was more exciting for them than for the students - no more lesson plans! (At least until I get to Jiangsu University around September 1st.)
I'm sure everybody's seen those pictures from China where a guy is using a little tiny cart to haul WAY too much stuff - you know the photos - small guy, small cart, WAY too much stuff. Right? Well, I saw exactly that! Tiny man peddling a tiny little transport cart that was about 20 feet high packed with bags full of stuff. The funny thing is that he gave me a funnier look than I gave him! A "laowai" is a lot weirder than the small-guy-huge-cart combo here in Huai'an.
My city has nuclear power! I did not expect that. I was on bus 8 cruising to the downtown area the other day and I saw a giant nuclear plant.
I've been watching a lot of Chinese television. Everything is aired in mandarin and there are subtitles in Chinese characters. I can watch for characters that I want to learn, hear how they say them, look them up in my dictionary, and get the meaning! By doing this, I learned the character "an" - the character that I had been seeing ALL over town. Turns out it's the second character in "Huai'an," the name of my city! Oops ... where is my common sense sometimes? I was thinking, "Wow, every store must sell that, whatever it is!" Nope, every store just has "Huai'an" in the name.
I was playing pictionary with my students and had them draw an airplane. One cute little girl drew a picture on the board that, as an American, I would associate with phallic imagery. (Not associate - bluntly, she drew a penis. No adult could have looked at her picture and seen anything else.) Immediately, another student ran up and wrote "airplane" underneath. Ok! Chinese kids think that airplanes look like genitalia. :) Just one more funny cultural difference that you don't read about in the travel books.
Today, I came downtown, found the bus station, and bought a ticket to Shanghai all by myself, all in Chinese! I was very proud. I chatted for about 10 minutes yesterday with the store owner of the small shop where I get my water bottles. I was buying a bottle of beer, he told me it wasn't a very good one, and I changed it out for a bottle of his favorite - all in Chinese! I know it's a simple thing, but I'm just excited to actually be understood.
My Chinese friend Li thought it was really funny when I told him that most American products have "made in China" stickers. He asked if it signified a high quality because of the hard working Chinese people... I just told him, "Yeah, I think that's exactly what it means." - not, "No, it means you bought it at Wal-Mart for a dollar." Who am I to be a snob? I use things "made in China" every day now, and they work just fine. (Let me assure you - the Chinese economy is keeping its best products here in China for consumption and exporting the CRAP to the U.S. for the Wal-Mart shelves. The same cliche applies: you get what you pay for.)
I saw an awesome "Be more polite" commercial on TV the other night. A lot of attractive, affluent people were walking around Beijing being really polite to each other: holding doors, letting pedestrians cross first, waiting in lines. The city wants to put forward a more polite, welcoming face for the 2008 Olympics. I don't think those commercials have quite hit their target here in Huai'an - I almost get run over, people cut in front of me in lines, and people blow smoke in my face or spit in my general direction everyday. I don't mind - actually, it's nice to "loosen my belt," so to say. (In better words, my own etiquette is lax these last few days! I just went to the front of a long line at the bus station and cut in, bought my ticket, and laughed... I wanted to turn around and say, "Welcome to China, bitches!" but I think the hilarity would be lost on my audience.)
I swear, if I see another American at the store waiting in line, that is exactly what I'm going to do. Cut-in, say my line!
All I know tomorrow is that I'll be arriving somewhere in Shanghai and trying to find the metro. If I can find the metro, then I can make my way to my hostel. Once I get there, I can settle in a little for my week-long stay and hopefully find a grocery store nearby. I'll need some delicious snacks!
Ok, my next blog update will be from Shanghai (probably?). Look forward to it!
Finding a Routine - Saturday July 21st, 2007
No new photos yet because I can't get a USB interface in the internet cafe: My Picasa Web Album - when I get my own computer, I'll upload new ones.
Yesterday, I celebrated my 2 week anniversary with China. She's a tough mistress! But things are still going very well.
They call Nanjing one of the "four ovens of China." This is because it's ridiculously hot here. To add to the heat, we sit at 80% humidity all the time (well, all the time that it's not raining, which I guess is 100% humidity... so it ranges from 80% to 100%!).
I'm starting to find a good routine - wake up around 5:45 a.m., go running with Gregory at the school track (only about every-other day), get some breakfast, and then teach 4 lessons at school 1. Have lunch around 11:00, and by 11:30 I'm back at my hotel to take a nap and have my second shower of the day.
I spend my afternoons at school 2 teaching 4 more lessons from 2:30 - 5:15. I have my driver take me back to school 1's cafeteria for dinner, then I chill at my hotel either reading, hanging out with the other Americans, or watching soccer on CCTV 5. China was in the Asia Cup, but they just lost to Uzbekistan.
My intestines are actually adjusting to my anxiety / nerves / diet. Is it weird that I felt like a champion of merit when my bowel movement was firm and regular?! I felt like I truly accomplished something. Just two weeks in China and my body is adjusting very quickly to my new conditions.
I love the grocery store. I go and buy everything imaginable just so I can try to figure out what it is. In the meat section, all the meat is laid out like it's produce. People just reach out, grab the raw meat with their bare hands, and throw it in a plastic bag. When I finally live in an apartment with a kitchen, I think I'll give the meat section a try. (As long as I'm cooking it, I can make sure all the germs are DEAD before I eat it.)
I've tried some pretty rockin' juices. I especially like the kiwi fruit juice. My other favorite foods here are the seseme seed-covered cookies and the pastries with sweet bean paste in the middle.
The ladies in my lunch room at school try to make "special" dishes for the Americans - things they think we like because they've seen it in pictures or something. They tried to make American mashed potatoes and gravy - they came close! They diced up potatoes and poured milk on top. I had no idea what was on my plate until my Chinese friend Li explained, "This is not a Chinese dish, this is American food. Mashed potatoes." Nooo, you'd have to cook the potatoes, then mash them up, then add milk, and then make some gravy! I have a hilarious picture of my plate with diced potatoes in milk.
They also tried to make us toast with jam - instead of toast, they used sesame buns; instead of jam, they used sweet and sour sauce. We had hamburger buns doused in sweet and sour sauce. Today, the lunch lady made me a special egg sandwich - a fried egg, two slices of bread... (I know what you're thinking, "She was really close this time!" but no, just wait)... it was covered in jam! Strawberry jam! Not just a little jam on the egg - the whole thing was drowning in jam! Where was that jam when she wanted to feed me toast?!
The food experience of China is amazing. One minute I'm gagging on a giant fish bone that I didn't expect to find in my "chicken," and the next minute I'm begging for seconds of a food I don't recognize, can't pronounce, but I'm convinced it's the best thing I've ever eaten! I eat about 3 bowls of rice everyday - sometimes fried, sometimes just steamed, and sometimes in rice soup.
Oh - side note - it's not real milk unless it's served boiling hot. For calcium, I can either drink boiling hot REAL milk or I can drink the thick, sweetener-added creamy white stuff that only resembles milk in color. I'm probably suffering from serious calcium deficiency already. Maybe I'll look for other reliable sources of calcium in foods online.
Anyway, I'm happy and healthy still! I survived my first two weeks in China which, I'm guessing, will be my two most exciting, scary, and dangerous weeks. From here on out, my routine should help keep me safe and healthy. (At least until I move out of this city ... on Friday! I'm going to miss Huai'an, this is a pretty sweet place to be!)
Arriving in China and Initial Adjustments - Sunday July 15th, 2007
View some pictures of my first week at my Picasa Web Album - when I get my own computer, I'll upload them to the "Photos" area of this site.
Wow! That one word really sums up everything so far. I landed in Shanghai, China on July 6th, 2007 at about 5:30 p.m. While waiting for my bags, I exchanged about $320 American (for about 2400Y). I picked up my bags, proceeded through the health officials, then immigration, then customs, and I was greeted outside Gate 10 by Echo, my Chinese contact, who was about 4'10" tall. I waited around the airport until Karen from Denver landed, then we all proceeded outside in torrential downpouring rain to hop on a bus for Nanjing. I had gone over 24 hours without really sleeping and I was exhausted. The next thing I know, I woke up and we were there.
We went to the Hua Dong Hotel and settled in. We arrived around 1:00 a.m. and I had to be up by 7:00 a.m. for a local tour of Nanjing. I somehow got up on time and downstairs for breakfast. My first Chinese meal: the biggest breakfast buffet I had ever seen! It was all-inclusive. One table had some pastries, breads, and muffins. Another had soups and oatmeals. A table was devoted to drinks (tang, coffee, tea, water, and soda), and finally a giant table in the middle had every meat dish imaginable, pot stickers, dumplings, rice, noodles, etc. etc.
The local tour was alright - except for the fact that there were 70 of us teachers participating in various programs around the Jiangsu Province, and most of them are old Christian white people. I've always been more excited to "tour" by local standards - taking the local bus, hopping a cab, etc. Instead, we had giant John-Madden-sized RV buses cruise us to three different locations: a mausoleum, the Confuscious Temple area, and the Nanjing Museum. The day was long, but our equally-large dinner compensated for my exhaustion. We ate out at an interesting restaurant where they brought us the "local specialties." They turned out to be 45 small dishes of different foods from around Jiangsu Province. The highlights included baby ducks and eels. I also enjoyed my first Chinese beer - it tasted like PBR.
The following day, we had an orientation with all the "head dudes" in charge of the Jiangsu Department of Education. It was basically a time for the leaders of the old Americans to shake hands in a big photo-op with bureaucrats. The Q&A session took way too long (never give a room of 70 old women in China a chance for questions on an "open mic"), but soon it was over, we had a big lunch, and it was time to travel to our destination cities.
My destination city was Huai'an, which is where I am now. I traveled here with two other Americans who are both coincidentally from Colorado. (Yay Coloradoans!) The fourth member of our group was Dan, a big, tall Canadian guy who seemed more like a fish out of water than any other foreigner I had yet seen in China. We were picked up by Tommy, the Foreign Language School of Huai'an's representative, and we drove in two cars for about 4 hours North to Huai'an.
He took us straight to our Su Yuan hotel. The hotel is one of the biggest and nicest in town - which isn't saying much. The hall is constantly damp and smells like mold. The carpets are all wrinkling and the AC only works sporadically. However, the rooms were clean and large; actually clean and large enough to exceed my expectations! We settled in at the hotel and soon had our first big banquet with the leaders of the school.
This banquet was a lot of fun - four foreign teachers, two Chinese men who spoke some English, and 3 other Chinese men who didn't speak a word. We taught them "cheers" for making toasts with first wine and later beer. They wanted to make toasts every 3 minutes. Sometimes they would pick one of us specifically for a toast, other times they would just make the entire table drink. I switched to beer very early so I could stay relatively sober - no need to welcome myself to Huai'an with my first Chinese hangover! (Which, fortunately, I have yet to enjoy.) I taught them some new English slang: "Bottoms up!"
The next day was our first day at the school. The children gave us a roaring standing ovation in a large auditorium where we were given giant bouquets of flowers. A young girl read a speech entirely in Chinese. Our first classes weren't until the afternoon.
I was told that my summer program students at the Foreign Language School would be older - I was expecting high-school-aged students with intermediate language skills. As it turned out, I had very young children (between 8 - 12 years old) and the only English they knew were rehearsed phrases: "How are you I am fine thank you and you. I like winter best because I can make a snowman with my friend." etc. In other words, they were extreme beginners in learning English!
The first week which I just recently ended was maybe the slowest week of my life. Making a lesson plan that can both be understood by really basic learners and also teach them something new and useful is really difficult. As of yet, the hardest part of my move is making lesson plans everyday. (Well, that, and the constant shift between being painfully constipated and having torrential diarrhea. I need to hurry and adjust to my new diet of strange animals and fried things!)
After the second day of class, we decided to hop a bus and see where it went. The #63 bus from a stop near our hotel takes us to a really large store called the "Times." It has a KFC on the first floor and sells normal department store stuff. The second floor includes household items and clothing, and the top floor is a full, well-stocked grocery store. I was walking past the live eel tank in the produce section when an eel flipped out and landed right next to my foot and started flopping around. It scared me to death! I also saw a girl stab a red-eared slider turtle with a screwdriver. She must need to make turtle soup!
Most of the stores around town are very small, very dirty, family-owned shops that look like storage units lining the streets. Most of these sell a combination of bottled drinks, toiletries, and cigarettes. A few are more specialized - one sells only TV remotes, another sells junked out bicycles. There are more developed and modern-looking stores near the urban centers - clothing stores, shoe stores, electronics even! In general, though, it looks like that vast majority of the population in my city are peasant-class citizens living in apartment buildings that resemble shanties and they make their living either doing hard manual labor or selling the same few products that everybody else sells.
A representative for another foreign language school in the area approached me to work there in my free afternoons. (I'm only teaching in the mornings at my first school.) They offered me 100Y for each 30 minute lesson for 4 daily lessons - I figured it was a good deal to get 400Y extra per day for 2 hours of teaching lessons that I had already prepared. The students at that school are crammed 60-80 to a classroom. They're the same age as my first school's students, but their English language skills are even worse! Luckily, they can sing "Five Little Monkeys" a few times and they have are very well-behaved. I am the first foreigner that most of the students have ever seen - I get a standing ovation at the start and end of every lesson. Their eyes glue to me and I really get their undivided attention - it's nice! The extra money should make my time between Huai'an and moving into my apartment at Jiangsu University at the end of August more enjoyable.
I'm updating this journal entry from an underground (literally) internet cafe in downtown Huai'an. Cars are honking as they pass each other overhead (they honk for everything!), and I'm the only white dude within a 20 km radius. (The other Americans are back at the hotel, I wanted to explore the city on my own! Soon, I'll hop on Bus 8 and hope that it returns the same way it came.)
Life in China is hard to describe - it's basically NUTS. That's the best adjective I can think of to describe my experience so far. Everything you've ever heard about China isn't just true - it's understated. There are a LOT of people. There is a LOT of pollution. These cities have people living on top of people living on top of people. It's not just hot - it's an oven! It's not just humid, it's a torrential downpour! When it rains, it floods. When it doesn't rain, I melt to death. When I'm not on the toilet because of diarrhea, I'm wishing I was so that I could once again enjoy regular bowel movements!
I'm not saying that I'm not having the time of my life - because I am! Every day here is an adventure. I am as much of a mystery to the people I pass everyday as they are to me. My elementary Chinese skills have already proven to be invaluable! I have cash in my pocket, food in my stomach, and smiling faces to greet me every morning at school - I couldn't really ask for anything more!
My only real regret so far about my trip is that I had to leave the amazing, beautiful, intelligent girl that I love behind. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Yes - but it also makes the heart ache, worry, pine, and regret. I can't figure out how to find a public telephone to call her - I've asked around, but nobody here knows how to call America because they've never before seen an American - let alone tried to call one! Well, we can share daily emails and funny stories, we can send pictures and think of each other... but meanwhile, now is my chance to enjoy the greatest adventure of my life! And I can say without exaggeration that my first week in China has definitely been that.
