Settling Down

This past week we have begun settling down into our new lives here in China. We have been picking up a little more Chinese and are better able to get around town and accomplish the mundane things in life. Much of the useful information has been gleaned off of T.C., the fellow American in Chungzuo who has been living here for 4 years and has a very helpful wife named Xue Chan. Because T.C. is western he knows what we are looking for and knows the best places to eat, the best places to buy things, how to work the TV, and other enigmas of the area. Below is a photograph of Chungzuo city center called “Jiangzuo.” The population has tripled in the past four years leading to massive apartment buildings being built yet there are still little farm plots spread throughout the city.

Back at our University I find my teaching is a little repetitive. I teach the same lesson 11 times every week. This week I taught my 500+ students how to make phone calls in English. At the end of the class I taught them an American pop song called “Telephone” by Lady Gaga. I never liked the song and I liked it less and less every time I heard it. But I actually really enjoy teaching. I think I get a laugh out of the class about every 2 or 3 minutes. Here is a photo of Fiona and I standing in front of the school entrance.
We have also been pretty physically active – playing badminton, basket ball, ping pong, and running track. The Chinese are very good at basket ball and ping pong but seem to have never considered running for the sake of running. Every other Friday and Saturday nights are “Dance Parties” where the students practice dances like the Cha Cha and Waltzes. This week Fiona taught the students Popcorn, the Hokey Pokey, the Chicken Dance, the Cupid Shuffle, and the Cha Cha Slide.

Everyone had a great time.

One day we hiked up the local peak which turned out to be more treacherous that I would have expected. The native limestone rocks formed knife-like edges and the thorny plants proved exceedingly inhospitable. But the view from the peak made it all worth it. Below is a photo of Guangxi Normal University for Nationalities (right) and the new development of Chungzuo (left). All the roads and buildings in the panorama are brand new.

Right click and open the picture in another window to get the real panoramic effect.


On Saturday we got up at 6am to take the 2 hour train ride to Nanning. From our train car we saw the beautiful agricultural countryside amidst the hilly karst topography.

Nanning is city of 3 million people and is the capital of Guangxi Province which makes it very crowded and chaotic.

But we were guided through the city by three of our clever students: Bruce, Jeremy, and William.



Nanning has many western amenities including American fast food, Wal-Mart, and most importantly cheese.

We picked up enough cheese and pasta sauce to last us a month. Every company that is thought of as cheap in the United States is considered classy in China. Wal-Mart is akin to a Safeway, Pizza Hut has waiters, and while the prices at these places are a little cheaper than in the United States they seem like a rip off in China.


The Chinese are very fond of high fashion runway shows. Every weekend there is a fashion show right outside of the Wal-Mart. This week the theme was “wedding dresses” and we watched for about 10 minutes as the never ending procession of models paraded down the runway in their poufy attire.

Sunday we bought a second-hand gasoline powered scooter for about 150 bucks.

It only has about 2,000 miles on it and is in good condition. We now can get into town without having to pay or deal with the rickshaw drivers. It will save us money especially considering that we probably can sell it for about the same as we paid for it. We also will be able to freely explore the surrounding area yielding great photos and better blog posts!
-George

Week 1 Teaching

We have survived our first week and a half of teaching and it sure has been a steep learning curve. We spent the first few days teaching all the classes together. We created a presentation about America, California, and our lives back home with lots of pictures that everyone loved. Our schedule wasn’t completely set for the first few days and it was really nice having both of us in the first non-English major class we taught, which had about 200 people! I don’t think I have ever talked in front of 200 people and it was a little nerve racking. At the beginning of this week, our schedules changed because trying to teach 200 people who don’t speak English very well is a difficult thing to do. Luckily, the school was able to move things around and make the classes smaller, so we can give each student more attention.

I am teaching 5 English major classes and 3 non-English major classes, while George is teaching 8 non-English major classes. However, each class meets for more than one period. We are each teaching 21 hours a week. Between us, we probably have close to 1000 students.

It is very difficult to remember everyone’s name (especially their Chinese names!). On top of our teaching, we also lead “English Corner”, which meets for 1 hour on Tuesday and Thursday nights. This is a time for all the students, including the ones who aren’t in our classes, to ask us questions and practice their English. English Corner is fun, but I feel bad because not all students get a chance to talk with us. The students all use a program called QQ, which is the Chinese version of instant messenger. We created QQ accounts for them to talk to us on, which is a great way for the shy students to talk with us. Our goal is just to get everyone to practice their English as much as they can, with us and with each other.

The students are all so friendly and helpful. In every class, we get invited to their hometowns, out to lunch, to go on a class trip, go shopping with them in town, or play sports with them. We are very popular and we have to be prepared when going out because everyone says “Hello” to us or joins us when we are trying to run on the track. We have bought ping pong paddles and badminton rackets so we can play with the students. They are all much better than us, especially at ping pong!

We had a busy first weekend here. We spent Friday night at the “Dance Party” learning how to dance. They dance with specific dance steps and it is similar to ballroom dancing. They only have one CD so it just plays about 4 songs over and over which is funny. George and I are not very good dancers, but we are going to try and learn some steps to use at our wedding! Saturday we got up early and left for a BBQ at 8 in the morning. We went to the Stone Forest with a group of Tourist Management majors.

The Stone Forest is made of limestone rocks and is very impressive:


The students wouldn’t let us help prepare anything or clean anything up, they just wanted to feed us! Every student wanted to cook something for us, but that was ok because we wanted to try everything. They had corn, chicken wings, beef, meat balls, fish balls, hot dogs, tofu, eggplant, a leafy vegetable we had never seen before, among other things.

They coat everything with oil, BBQ sauce, and spices. The spices are great because while it tastes spicy, it doesn’t burn your mouth afterwards. If you know me, I hate spicy food because of the burning afterwards, so this spice is perfect for me! They did allow us to learn how to make dumplings and we are going to try making them ourselves at home.


We also played tag on the game field,
and taught the students how to play Go Fish and B.S.
By the end of the day, we were so full we just wanted to get home to go to sleep. On Sunday we went shopping with some of our English major students. It was our first time going out to eat with someone who knows what to order. It was nice to have a translator for the day.

This weekend we are taking it easy. Tonight we are going to try to find the one other foreigner in town. There is a man here who owns a bar called “The Western Cowboy”. He is from Tennessee, but married a Chinese woman and has settled down. We are looking forward to meeting him.

-Fiona

We found a place for you!

Friday night (March 5) we returned to our Beijing hotel and a note which scrolled “we found a place for you! You leave tomorrow!” The next day we learned that we were going to go the city of Nanning in Guangxi province in the south of China to teach 14 year olds. This turned out to be false information but we will get to that later.

The train took 30 hours – by far the longest time I have spent on any type of transportation. This time we had the top bunk and it was a pretty pleasant journey except for the fact that the music/communist propaganda and overhead light was on all night. We thought that this was the way these old trains worked but right before we got off the train we noticed the one of the bottom bunk passengers reach under the bedside table and turn up the music. Turns out you could turn off the lights and the speakers too! Why they didn’t I have no idea.

We got off the train having no idea what to expect. We were greeted by Ms. Dang, a fellow teacher who informed us that we were actually going to a city called Chongzuo about an hour and a half to the west of Nanning and only about an hour away from Vietnam. We also learned the name of our school, Guangxi Normal University for Nationalities; we were actually going to be teaching college freshman who were only a couple years younger than us!

When we arrived at the school we met Mr. Deng who showed us our apartment. The apartment was above and beyond anything we expected. It is brand new; we are the first tenants. Massive living room:

two bedrooms, two balconies, an office:
and a kitchen:
It is also fully furnished and someone bought us everything we need from spices, to stationary, to toothbrushes, to umbrellas! The picture below is taken from our back balcony and shows farmers burning their fields to plant their crops:

In the morning we found a campus which is a total construction zone. Only about a third of the buildings are complete and everything else is a mess. This is the partially constructed library:
and this is the building we teach in:

The campus is also very remote. It is located in the middle of farmland and it takes about a 20 minute rickshaw ride to get into the Chongzuo city center – which by China standards is only a small town. I don’t think many people have seen foreigners around here. Everyone we pass stammers “hello” and then giggles furiously with their friends. We will give a longer description of the school, students, and our classes next blog.

Beijing Arrival

Things didn’t get too much better once we got to Beijing and tried to call the man who was going to meet us at the subway. We were unable to figure out the weird pay phones, but a nice subway employee saw us having trouble and offered us her cell phone. Well, that was great, but then he didn’t answer the phone! We didn’t know what to do, so we got back on the subway and tried to find a stop with a Starbucks or McDonalds that had internet. We finally got through to him and met him back at the original subway stop.

Next, it was more bad news. The school we were planning on going to in Guilin decided that they only have enough students and money to employ one teacher. Since we don’t want to be split up, this wasn’t going to work for us. Currently, we are hanging out in Beijing waiting to hear if there is a school somewhere in China that will hire both of us to teach. It is looking like we will end up in the Beijing area, but things are still up in the air.

The good thing to come out of this is that the agency helping us is providing us with a hotel and we have the days free to explore this large city. It blows my mind how many people are here. There are nearly 18 million people living in Beijing, that’s almost half the size of California! Our first day was spent recovering from the train ride and trying to figure out where we were exactly. We ventured out to find a place to eat and had to go just off pointing to pictures of food. This is the first place we have been with absolutely no English anywhere. The next day we managed get on the correct busses and subways and found ourselves in Tiananmen Square. We took a tour of the Forbidden City, which is where the Emperor’s of China lived with their Empress and concubines for around 500 years:


The Forbidden City is huge, with multiple palaces and temples, and we could have easily spent more than one day there:

The day ended with a quest to find internet, since our hotel doesn’t have any. We were successful, but it’s annoying since we have to lug a computer around with us. The next day we headed back to Tiananmen Square but found it was all roped off because of a Chinese Government meeting:

We walked around the edge of the square and down a street that was hosting The Lantern Festival. Colorful lanterns hung as far as we could see:

As we were entering we passed a sign showing all the things you aren’t allowed to do here. The funniest ones are “No Juggling” and what we thought was “No Love” but looks like it is actually “No drawing on the wall”:
Our city walk ended at the Temple of Heaven:

We got there too late to go into the temple itself, but it is surrounded by a huge park that we enjoyed walking around and observing people practicing Tai Chi:
The temple is beautiful, like most of the old buildings here, and full of color.

Today we decided to go to the Beijing Zoo, mainly because we wanted to see some pandas! We saw lots of pandas, as well as almost every other animal imaginable from all over the world, including tigers, lions, bears, and hippos:

Besides the bitterly cold weather we had a great day. Despite the cold and snow on the ground, we luckily have not had it rain or snow on us at all since we have arrived in China. Not sure how much longer we can go though.

We were brave this evening and tried our first food from a street vendor. It just looked too delicious to pass up so we decided to risk our health. We had a pancake with egg, onions, and some strange sauce. It was so good! There are people on every corner selling sausages, pancakes, corn, and potatoes from grills attached to their bicycles. The one thing we can’t figure out is this foul smelling food that looks like fermented tofu but seriously smells like moldy wet dog. I can’t even get close enough to figure out what is because the smell is so bad. We are hoping to get some good news soon about our teaching situation so we can get to work!

Tour de Shanghai

The 24 hour train ride from Hong Kong to Shanghai was spent in a “Hard Sleeper Cabin” which means six beds to a room open to the rest of the train. That night Fiona and I learned the Chinese like to yell and smoke cigarettes. But when we got Shanghai we were amazed at the luxury of our room at the classy Metropole Hotel circa 1930 (Photo 1).

The next two days were spent wandering around the vast city which makes Hong Kong look like a quaint tourist town. Shanghai is a city of high fashion and expensive taste although it is actually a real bargain compared to California. The Metro costs about 40 cents to go anywhere and meals usual end up costing about $3.00 per person. It is a great place to take a vacation on a budget.
First thing we did was ride the “Shanghai Transrapid” maglev (photo 2); the fastest train in the world. 431km/hr is by far the fastest I have ever travelled on the ground and it is a little terrifying thinking of what would happen if there was a power outage.

We toured our 3rd Buddhist temple which was a lot like the previous two – lots of people worshiping huge jade and golden deities while choking on wafts of incense smoke (photo 3). The temple was one of the only old artifacts we saw in Shanghai.






The city is experiencing rapid construction development to say the least. Most manhole covers are engraved with a date of completion and walking around for two days I only saw a couple that were predate 2004. Photo 4 shows one group of buildings that were all built in 2008-2009.






As far as I can tell almost all the buildings are designed and built by Japanese or Korean companies. Although the Chinese know how to put up buildings they just can’t seem to figure out how to do the telephone wires! They are like this all over the city (photo 5).




We went up the Shanghai World Financial Center Building (photo 6) which is the third tallest building in the world and has the tallest observation deck in the world.





It was a little cloudy but it was still awesome walking across a glass floor almost half a kilometer in the sky (photo 7).






One last thing to mention was the omnipresent Gumby rip off we found at every corner of the city (photo 8). Shanghai is hosting the 2010 world expo and this merry little guy is the mascot. The event’s motto is “better city, better life” which I believe the people of Shanghai are embracing enthusiastically.