Out and About Chongzuo

The Yushu earthquake in Qinghai province has dominated the news here in China. Wednesday was China’s official day of mourning. At 9:30 in the morning air raid sirens blared and there was a moment of silence. No one was allowed entertainment for the day; every TV channel played the identical morose montage and all entertainment-based websites were offline. As an outsider I can’t help but wonder if this government policy inspires more frustration than compassion. It seems like the government treats its citizens like untrustworthy children. For all the talk of modernization, China has some maturing to do.

Mature or not, there is no doubt that the times are a changing in China. Rapid economic transformation is evident by the countless factories and high rise buildings springing up out of the land that was previously 5’x10’ farm plots. Change is also evident by the generation gap between our students and their parents. I think the current generation shares many of the same traits that the baby boomers have. They are in fact a bit of a baby boom themselves with more than 200 million people between the ages of 15 and 25. They tend to be both economically and culturally more liberal than their parents. They borrow money rather than save money and they value trends and fashion even more than Americans. They love what is new and hate what is old. There doesn’t seem to be much counterculture here. When these kids grow up and have money they will make a great consumer market.

Another odd thing about China is how a craft that took weeks of painstaking work to make only will sell for a couple of dollars. Labor has no value in China. Minimum wage is ~$1/hour but it isn’t enforced. The government doesn’t bother enforcing things like that. They care about political and social stability, and economic growth. Things like expired food, pollution and traffic laws (China has the highest traffic accident morality rate per capita of any country) are simply not priorities here.

Enough social exposé, let’s get on with the happenings of our lives.

A few weeks ago we told our students we hated it here and we were going to go back to America… “April Fools!!” A few moments of bewildered silence passed and then suddenly all the students screamed at the top of their lungs, “AAAAAAAAAh!!!” One of Fiona's students said "You should not joke. I almost cry!" We got them good.

I’ve been teaching the non majors a new topic each week: personal introductions, phone calls, school, family, jobs, and this week, talking at work. The school asked me to teach the students cultural awareness and get them to talking out loud in English. I try to keep them learning and also keep them interested. Many students flipped out when I told them about same-sex and interracial marriages in the United States. My PowerPoint presentations are getting increasingly detailed and lengthy but there is nothing as useful and entertaining as describing things with diagrams and photographs.

The past two weekends we have chosen to stay at home and ride our “motos” (Chinese for moped) around the area where we live.
We have explored in just about every direction. A few times we have ended up going down long single track dirt roads and getting to little impoverished villages that feel like they are waaay out there.

No way these places are on any maps. Perhaps we are the first foreigners to ever venture here. Everyone looks at us like “what the hell are you doing here?”

The rides have given us a sense of the local surroundings. To the East and South there lies beautiful farmland country, farmers, tractors, water buffalo and not much else.

To the North lies the center of our town called “Jiangzhou.”

Jiangzhou straddles the meandering Zuo Jiang River. We found an ancient leaning tower on an island in the river.

Past the Zuo Jiang River are beautiful karst mountains and about an hour into these mountains lies another small town whose name is unknown.

To the West is the new development of Chongzuo City (our school is part of this). It is an area about 2x4 miles composed of brand new roads and streetlights. Only about 15% of the land has buildings on it and the rest of the land is abandoned banana plantations. The buildings are all less than three years old and they tend to be 4-8 stories tall. At each construction site there are little shanty towns that house the construction workers. There are very few people or cars on the streets and it seems like a brand new ghost town. There is no way this development is economical and is obviously a result of government planning.

This photo is of a local in front of our school.

This illustrates how they build roads in China. They lay a foundation of cement about a foot thick. I figure given the abundance of cheap limestone and coal, it might be cheaper to build the roads like this, not to mention that these roads will hold up for a long time.

Last week we went to our first “KTV” which is Karaoke Chinese-style. Basically you go into something that feels a little like a nightclub except there are dozens of private rooms complete with Karaoke machines, deafening speakers, lasers, and black lights. T.C. invited us to a company party there. Fiona and I sang a few songs and played dice games. It was pretty fun but it was one of those things that you need to have a few beers in you to properly enjoy the experience and we never got there.

We have been getting our fruits and vegetables at the outdoor market. It is a huge farmer’s market that goes on all day and is a little cheaper than the grocery store. It has just about everything you want and more, including dead dogs laid out next to the cages of dogs ready to be butchered. One man’s best friend is another man’s dinner.

-George

Trip to Guilin and Yangshuo

Last weekend we had a holiday for “Tomb Sweeping Day”. This is a day for the Chinese to honor their ancestors and clean off their graves. The holiday ran from Sunday to Tuesday, but most of the holidays in China aren’t really holidays because you must always make up the days of work/school you missed on the previous/following weekend. We were supposed to have our Tuesday classes on the Saturday before, but we managed to convince the school officials to let us make them up on a different day. We left Chongzuo on Friday and took the bus to Guilin, about a 7 hour ride. After arriving, we realized we had a problem because the hotels require us to have passports to get a room. Well, our passports are getting new work visa’s and are in Beijing right now. Luckily, we traveled with our students and they were able to find us a hotel that would take our California Driver’s Licenses.

On our first day in Guilin, we went to Merryland which is the Chinese version of Disneyland.

It is complete with a Buddha where everyone prays before they enter the park. It was a rainy day (the first rain we have seen in China), which worked to our advantage because there were no lines for any rides. In the Wild West Town, there were pony rides, so I got pet my first horse in over a month! I was so excited to see a real horse!

There were signs everywhere in Merryland that said “No Striding”. It should say “No Running”. The Chinese really need to employ some native English speakers to write their signs.


We didn’t really want to go to Merryland because it was just like an American theme park. It also meant we didn’t get to see that much of Guilin, but we were invited by our students so it was polite to go. Merryland is surrounded by the nicest scenery of any amusement park I have ever been too.

That night we took the bus to Yangshuo, the hometown of one of our students. We ate dinner with her family once we arrived and ate our first field snails! They actually didn’t taste too bad, and we ended up eating more than one. Yangshuo is a very touristy town, with a “West Street”. We saw the most foreigners we have seen since arriving in China, more per capita than even Hong Kong. The best part about it being such a tourist town is all the western food! It was great to be able to read the menus and know exactly what we would be eating.

We rented bikes on a rainy Sunday and rode into the countryside.

We saw the “Big Banyan Tree”, a tree that is almost 2,000 years old (right click to open in another window for the full effect):

We also took a boat ride into a cave and saw the amazing stalactites and stalagmites, which are precipitated limestone deposits.

Then we ate the best Chinese food we have had since we’ve been here. I love dining with the students because they know exactly what to order. It is hard to eat the Chinese meat with chopsticks because it is often infused with shards of bone and grizzle. It is definitely an art, but we are improving.

The one night we were in Guilin we met another English teacher, Luke, who went to University of Southern California for college. We exchanged phone numbers with him and said we would meet up in Yangshuo. We got together with him and his friends Sunday night at Monkey Jane’s. For any young foreigner traveling to China, Yangshuo is the city to visit and Monkey Jane’s is the place to stay. It is a hostel, with a bar on the top floor. We traded teaching stories and the funniest one from them was a student who named themselves “Autism”. They suggested maybe Autism was not the best name, so the student changed their name to “Not Autism”. I think the students just open the dictionary and randomly picked a word that sounds pretty. We have some pretty funny names too, like “Forever King”, “Stone”, “Rainbow”, “Hedgehog”, and “Hamburger”. After Monkey Jane’s we ventured to a Chinese club and danced the night away to some awful music.

We woke with horrible hangovers and spent the morning sleeping. This area is famous for the karst topography, formed from limestone dissolution inconsistencies. We spent Monday without our students and walked up one of the mountains in the city to get a good view. The mountains are just amazing, and if China wasn’t grey every single day, it would be even more beautiful.

On our way home, George realized that in his hung-over stupor, he had left his bank card in the ATM machine. My bank account got hacked into last week, so I had to cancel my card. This left us with no Chinese money, and no way to get money. Luckily, we had some American money on us. We had bus tickets as far as Nanning, but that is 2 hours away from our school. We had to get money to make it home. Once we arrived at the bus station, we convinced a motorcycle driver to drive me to the bank and I could pay him 5 US dollars because I had no Chinese money. I said good-bye to George and hoped I that I would make it back to the bus station with the correct money. The motorcycle driver turned out to be very safe, even giving me a helmet to wear (helmets are rare). Once getting to the bank, I was told I needed a passport to change money. If you remember, we don’t have our passports right now! We ended up using the security guard’s ID, after I started to freak out telling the banker, “I have no money, no passport and don’t speak Chinese! You need to help me!” In the end, everything worked out and we made it home safe and sound.

We had a busy week organizing our classes and making up the classes we missed because of the holiday. We held English Corner this week in a classroom and showed the students some American TV. We showed them “Friends”, “The Simpsons”, some music videos, and “Charlie Chaplin”. They thought Charlie Chaplin was hilarious.

We are spending this weekend taking care of business, exploring the country side on our “moto” and tonight we are going to eat pizza with TC, our one American friend. Talk to you soon!

- Fiona

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!