Unqualified Expertise

goodbye Qingdao

2006-06-19T13:32:00.000+08:00

Tomorrow morning we're flying to Hong Kong to meet my family, to start a two week trip before returning back to the states. After our trip we'll go together to Portland OR, and then two weeks later I'll head east to hang out in the Philly area, visit friends, and scope out affordable nyc housing. (By the way, anybody else going to live in nyc next year?) Britta's plans are still a bit vague, but she'll be staying in Portland longer. We should have another post or two from our last trip, and maybe I can rope a family member into writing a guest post. So don't give up on us here quite yet.

bad news about hot pot

2006-06-06T17:23:00.000+08:00

I'm in my last week of chinese classes (we're going to be leaving the city june 20th), so my classes have turned into a free-for-all of (mostly) chinese language conversation. Recent topics have included grilled meat, corruption, american political parties and curse words, among many others. Today at one point the topic turned to Sichuan hot pot.

I'm pretty sure I've talked about hot pot before, but for what it's worth: hot pot involves a (usually communal) bowl of boiling broth to which you can add veggies, starches, and most importantly thinly sliced meats. Sichuan style hot pot is particularly famous, the broth has lots of hot peppers, spices and peanut oil in it.

This style of hot pot, I learned today, is also referred to as "saliva pot." The broth, with its precious peppers, spices and oil, is just too valuable to throw out each time that a group of customers finishes dining. Instead, this broth, which has been infused by the flavor of countless diners' chopstick-spittle, is served again to the next guests. The only place in town that doesn't follow this practice A) is prohibitively expensive, and B) in a grossly unethical move sells its used broth to cheaper restaurants.

The lesson to take home is: DO NOT EAT SICHUAN HOT POT.

Back in Qingdao

2006-05-16T21:35:00.000+08:00

So we just got back from a trip to the far north-east - what used to be called Manchuria. I should probably write about that, but I think I'll just write about some curious things I saw today.

The first was when I went to lunch. Many restaurants here pick truly ridiculous uniforms for their servers. The one I went to today manages, even in this company, to be a standout. Servers wear an apron that says (in English) "Pretty Doggi" and has a large pocket in the middle with a picture of a... well I think you can guess. Today I was served by a man, and he was wearing one of those aprons.

This evening Britta and I went to a neighborhood called Taidong, a place where many people go for budget shopping, to pick up some clothes she had had made. Unfortunately her tailer was closed, so we just wandered around a bit. Taidong is pretty big and dispersed, but it has a core shopping area along a wide walking street. The only problem is that the walking street is broken at one point by a 5 lane road, and THERE IS NO LIGHT! Urban planners, avert your eyes.

Last Weekend

2006-05-08T14:31:00.000+08:00

None of this is especially groundbreaking cultural stuff, but I thought I would write a bit about a night out last weekend.

I met up with a friend at a local bar with cheap beer and a free pool table. With him was a friend of hers, a Chinese-American girl with family in Qingdao. She gets a phone call, and it turns out to be from her grandmother's doctor. The doctor is a relatively young woman, who sometimes goes clubbing with her. So the doctor shows up with some of the nurses she works with, and after settling down at a table she comes over and offers all of us packs of cigarettes (not individual cigarettes, packs of cigarettes) and then they settle down at a table with about three beers each.

Almost all of this story sounds really strange, perhaps even more strange given my experiences with Chinese culture. Nightlife, going to bars and clubs, is relatively new in Chinese society, and as far as I can tell hasn't sunken in outside of the most westernized cities. So I was a bit confused as to what all these nice Chinese women were doing out hours past a typical Qingdao bedtime. It turns out that they had come from a fellow coworker's wedding celebration, which explained some of it.

As for the beers per woman ratio at the table, that made more sense. Chinese people typically eat in, but when they eat out with company they order much more than they could possibly eat. To do otherwise would seem stingy. (Then, if they are relatively pure and frugal, they have to find a way to finish it anyway.) So it made sense that girls out on the town would fill the tables with beer. But then, after exchanging pleasantries and refusing most of the several beers that were pushed at us, we learned that they had already drunken about 4 tall beers each. I'm terrible with remembering liquid measurements, but I think those beers are about a liter each. So we were lead to the conclusion that while Chinese men can't drink all that much, Chinese woman are truly formidable.

Massage

2006-04-30T14:46:00.000+08:00

Yesterday Britta and I went to get a massage. Massages in China aren't seen the same way as they are in America, instead of being a form of pampering for wealthy people they are considered a medical treatment for everyone. There are two main consequences of this: they cost much less money and hurt a whole lot.

This was my first and Britta's second professional massage. She had previously gone to this place and got a card for 10 massages that costed just over 26 dollars total. Britta had told me that I should expect more pain than pleasure, but still I wasn't completely prepared.

Most of it consisted of finded a place that was tense (in my case it was just inside and above my shoulder blades) and trying to dig a hole through to the other side of our bodies. Meanwhile the masseuses would be making denigrading comments on our dietary habits and the states of various internal organs, or so I gathered from Britta later. I would just lie there, trying to will him to pick another spot while repressing the impulse to scream. There were occasional moments of pleasure, but mostly of that false kind that comes from the temporary absense of pain.

It's nearly 24 hours later, and I'm still pretty sore. The problem is that Britta has 7 more massages on her card, and we have 6 more weeks in Qingdao.

bad man!

2006-04-27T16:35:00.000+08:00

So today is the day we send our magazine to the publisher. Before it can be published however, we have to take it to a government censor, where they read through and check the content. Despite our best attempts at self censorship, we still had ran into a little problem. In our review page, we reviewed a Qingdao rapper, Sha Zhou. It turns out that he is a "bad man" who uses swear words and denigrates the countryside. Nevermind that we gave him a negative review,even the mention of him is too much in our magazine. Luckily we had a backup review, but still, welcome to the world of publishing in China.

yunnan!

2006-04-27T16:16:00.000+08:00

Dan and I are back in Beijing from our trip in Yunnan. We had a great time seeing an area of China completely different from the one we live in. For a quick recap, we flew into Kunming, the capital,and then spent a day in the surrounding area. We then took a night train to Dali, several 100 km north in the foothills of some mountains (which I think of as the Himalayas, but which are technically probably not.) We spent 2 and a half days here,and then took a bus to Lijiang, about 3 hours north, and also up in the mountains. From Lijiang, we flew to Kunming and then from Kunming back to Qingdao. We spent a total of 8 days there, though two were travel days. Ultimately, 6 days was not enough time to spend in this amazing region, in the future I would like to go back and spend a month or so bumming around the province. Yunnan, for those who don't know, is in SW China and borders a bunch of countries including Laos, Myanmar, Thailand (I think) as well as Tibet (which to be clear, I am not listing as a separate country). Southern Yunnan, where we didn't go, is very much like SE Asia (or so I've been told), with lots of SE Asian ethnic minorities. Northern Yunnan is much more Tibetan culturally, and there are many Tibetan-related minority groups living there, including the Bai and the Naxi (pronounced Na-shee in Chinese and Na-hee in Naxi, with a gutteral h).
Dali, the 2nd city (or town) we went to, is a Bai minority town, though in truth it is probably more culturally hippie, as it is jam packed full of small shops selling hemp draw string pants, tie-dyed jackets and bongs. Also, the number of dreadlocked/crunchy/hiking booted backpackers almost equaled the number of Chinese inhabitants of the city. Although slightly irritating (it felt like a Tibetan-themed Oregon State Fair), it did mean that we could indulge in guilty pleasures like the "Dali Lama's grand slam breakfast" of pancakes, eggs, and yak bacon, or muesli and yogurt, and of course, cheap fruit smoothies and coffee. While in Dali we went on a boat cruise and saw a temple and an incredibly touristy Bai village, where we were served "the Bai traditional three tea service," one tea being a bean tea with bits of Cheese floating on top, which does actually taste better than it sounds. The highlight of our time there was a hike we took up a mountain to this Buddhist temple. The hike was a steep hour-long scramble through old cemeteries and a beautiful forest, which reminded me a little bit of the Pacific NW with evergreen trees and wild flowers.
Lijiang is the largest city of the Naxi people, who unlike the Bai have retained much more of their cultural distinctiveness from Han chinese people, including their own written language and religion. As such, their tourist racket was also more highly organized, and the entire traditional city of Lijiang felt like some place in the Epcot center run by a cartel of grandmothers (the Naxi are matriarchal). Tourists in Lijiang tended to be Chinese, which is probably worse in my mind than hippies, because it meant the entire town was full of cheap trinkets and people in costumes harrassing you on the street trying to get you to buy something/ride a yak/take a picture with them, all things that Chinese tourists seem to enjoy but hippies tend to shy away from. Interestingly, most of the non-Chinese tourists seemed to be older Westerners or Japanese back-packers.
In Lijiang, the highlight of the trip was definitely meeting our shaman friend, who offered us an apprenticeship. Switching into anthropological mode,I asked him all about the Naxi religion, which is called Dongba (the word also means shaman, as in our friend is a Dongba). I am not totally clear, but basically the Naxi worship nature, and believe that everyone has a totem, which is determined based on astrological signs. There are deities, but they exist more as spirits than as omnipitent gods. Becoming a shaman is hereditary, our friend is a 18th generation shaman, but also depends on your own astrology, for example, out of all his brothers and sisters, he was the only one trained as a shaman because he was the one with the gift. As a shaman, you must master five fields of learning: astronomy, geography, art, law, and philosophy, as well as writing. Naxi is the last hieroglyphic language in use, and it was interesting to meet someone for whom it was their only written language. The dongba was illiterate in Chinese, so he would write things either in Naxi or using hieroglyphs as a phonetic transliteration of Chinese sounds. After training, a dongba must build up a following of people who want him to perform religious ceremonies for them, and as such, along with taking us around,our dongba spent much of the time we were with him networking with the random locals we met along the way (though most already seemed to know him). He would always introduce us as his apprentices, and then offer us and any various other people around, usually waitstaff or an idle tourguide, a lesson on reading Naxi. Most Naxi are illiterate in their own language, writing the hieroglyphs is a sign of prestige and high learning. It was interesting to see the combination of incredibly traditional (a shaman chanting hieroglyphs to uneducated laymen) and modern (the dongba was constantly on his cell phone, and collecting numbers, which he wrote in hieroglyphs in his little note book.) He made me teach him how to say, "I'd like some wine please" in English, and then transliterated it into Naxi. Besides teaching Naxi, copying ceremonial texts and performing ceremonies, his other source of income is from artwork, which he makes himself and sells. His ultimate goal is to start a school where Naxi traditional culture is passed on to the younger generation. He sells paintings on which he carves/paints traditional images and hieroglyphs for 180 yuan, or about $23. (I agreed to be his agent in Qingdao and America. If anyone is interested, e-mail me at ingebretson@gmail.com or dongba18@hotmail.com)

Besides befriending a shaman, we also went on another hike, this objectively one less strenuous, although the altitude, above 12,000 feet (4050 m) above sea level, made even a simple walk quite difficult. We went to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, a mountain of about 17,000 feet (it's 5500 meters) above sea level. We took a chairlift to a meadow, with stunning views of snow capped peaks clouded in mist, although the experience was considerably marred by people in native costumes hawking photos, horse rides, trinkets, etc. There was a wooden board trail meant in a loop where we were supposed to 'hike,' although we stepped off for a picnic lunch and also as a little detour, where we found an amazing trail with utterly stunning views. Unfortunately with the altitude began to do us in, and we were so tired and lightheaded we weren't able to do much more than just walk around the board.
On the whole, Yunnan was a gorgeous place, I can't wait to go back and do more serious hiking, as well as see more of the SE area.

guest blogger

2006-04-25T17:22:00.000+08:00

So as you may or may not know, I, Sarah Cohodes, have been traveling with the illustrious Britta and Dan throughout Yunnan after spending a few days in Qingdao. We've moved on from Dali, and are now in Lijiang, which contains fewer loopy crunchy white tourists and many Chinese tourists. But the city is really cool with cobblestone roads and canals. Of course, maybe it was all "reconstructed" in 1996, but we're still enjoying it. We capitalized on Britta's penchant for meeting and chatting up random people and ended up hanging out with a Naxi (the local minority) shaman for most of yesterday. He reads and writes Naxi, the last hieroglyphic language still in use, but not a bit of Chinese. Britta seemed to understand his Mandarin very well, however. Anyway, he invited me to come back to Lijiang and be an apprentice in his shop and said he'd find me a Naxi husband. As tempting as it is to make books and live in China, I think I'm going to pass up on the offer -- he's a total chainsmoker.

Off to Beijing tomorrow (for me, B and D are going home). We'll see how I manage with my beyond rudimentary Chinese.

EDIT: This is Britta here, Sarah asked me to add her highlight of the trip, which in her sleep-deprived state she forgot to include. Sarah went to the family of the boy I tutor for dinner one night. The grandmother was concerned that Sarah, a newly-arrived American, wouldn't get enough to eat, so during the meal, she kept force-feeding Sarah lettuce dipped in sauce (the grandma's favorite dish). If she caught Sarah not personally stuffing lettuce in her face, she would grab a piece and stick in in Sarah's mouth.

yunnan

2006-04-21T08:42:00.000+08:00

So, as I write this, I am sitting in a tibetan-themed hostel in Dali, a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas. We left Kunming last night on an overnight train, and arrived here early this morning. After some taxi haggling and random wandering, we finally found this hostel. The best part of this place is that it serves large, western-style breakfasts, complete with yak bacon. So far, our trip has been good, although not without small mixups (somehow, we found ourselves wandering around a small random village an hour outside of Kunming yesterday, instead of going to 1)the stone forest, or 2)this village with many ethnic minorities, our original two choices. But anyways, it was still very interesting.) We also met an elderly woman who was part of the "barefoot doctor" program, in which young doctors from large cities were sent into the countryside to serve rural communities. This woman was originally from Shanghai, and because her father and brother had studied in America, and she herself had gone to a mission school, she found herself sent to the remote regions of Yunnan. She said that living with ethnic minorities and teaching them medicine, Chinese, and 'culture' was one of the best experiences of her life. (She bestowed lavish praise on chairman Mao because of it.) Even after she was allowed back to Shanghai, she chose to come back and work in Yunnan. It's interesting to hear different points of view on the cultural revolution, especially after reading Anchee Min's "Becoming Madame Mao," our book club book. It's a semi-fictional biography about Mao's final wife, and I would definitely recommend it.
It's amazing how different Yunnan is from Shandong, or really anywhere else I've been in China (except maybe Chengdu). The climate, the architecture, and the people are all so different, it really doesn't feel like the same country. It was a huge shock to see palm trees. It's also taking a while to get used to "Yunanese," so far, it seems like most people I talk to can understand me perfectly, but I can barely understand them.

It's just a theory

2006-04-15T18:35:00.000+08:00

First of all, I'm going to CUNY next year. That whole thing is finally over.

I stumbled upon this train of thought while walking by an aerobics session at my gym, which then developed with the speed and inevitability characteristic of all such works of genius. Of course you can judge for yourself.

We're all probably familiar with the scenes from martial arts movies where the trainees in orderly rows punch in unison, following their master. And every student of martial arts (including the ones who study Karate for a couple years at the local JCC) will learn to do sets of moves that simulate a fight but actually consist of punching and kicking air in a more or less graceful fashion.

It occured to me that I had finally discovered the source of Chinese foreign language pedagogy. That is why Chinese teachers think it is useful to repeat phrases aloud, over and over, and why we encounter students whose parents force them to memorize and recite the texts of their books. In retrospect it seems so obvious.

Food!

2006-04-11T12:32:00.000+08:00

Dan and I are still recovering from last weekend in terms of food and alcohol. First, Sunday lunch we were invited to the house of a student I tutor. The family is a large close-knit peasant family who've worked themselves up through the communist bureaucracy into the upper middle class. However, they live in a large crowded apartment where there are old towels on the sofa, egg crates in the corner and random relatives running around. Nominally, I am there to tutor a 12 year old boy for his up-coming middle school entrance exam. However, whenever I come over (on the weekends), three cousins or so, several of his aunts, and his grandmother all mysteriously show up for the English lessons. And also like the typical extended Chinese family, they are ridiculously hospitable. From the minute I walk in the door, they stuff me with food to eat. On Saturday, they fed me a special sort of doughnut, strawberries, a tomato, a sweet potato, and then a 6 course dinner (not including rice and steamed bread). The next day, they invited me and Dan back for lunch. They are incredibly fastinated by Dan, especially because he is Jewish (they call him "Sylvester Stallone the Jew" but that's another story.), anyways, whenever I come over, they always ask why I don't bring my boyfriend along. For lunch, they went all out, preparing among other things a whole wild chicken, a fish, donkey meat, and something that might have been a bladder with black paste and rice inside. As the guest of honor, they made Dan eat a chicken foot, and also the chicken head. They also made us drink several glasses of beer (in Dan's cases it was several cans of beer). After we couldn't possibly eat any more, I gave the family an English lesson, and then we had to eat more sweet potato and water melon. After about 5 hours, we finally left the house in a food induced stupor. On our way home, a good friend called us up and asked if we could come to her birthday party that evening. So only about an hour and a half later, we found ourselves around the table at a fancy Chinese restaurant. There we had another banquet, this time with birthday cake (Qingdao's finest) and much more copious quantities of beer. The point of a Chinese host is to make the guests eat and drink as much as possible, and the more the host likes you, the more they make you eat and drink. All the dishes were incredibly delicious, and we ate for three more hours, all the while toasting eachother. On top of the other food, my friend also ate birthday noodles, because traditionally the noodles signified long life. Finally around 10:30, Dan and I finally went home, incredibly stuffed and bloated.

mullet X2

2006-04-11T12:07:00.000+08:00

On Saturday, Dan decided to get his haircut, and I went along to help with translation. However, after getting to the hair dresser, I decided I would also get a trim while we were there. Before I sat down to get my hair cut, I told Dan's hair cutter to cut shorter in the back but leave it longer on the sides and front. Then, I told my hair cutter that I just wanted to keep my hair long, no layers, and to just cut a little bit. For clarity, I showed him about how much hair I wanted cut off the bottom (about half and inch). However, it seems that: no layers, just a trim must also have the meaning: I want a mullet, and could you make it feathered, please. (For those that don't know what a mullet is, it's one of those short in the front, long in the back haircuts.) On that day I didn't wear my contacts, so after I removed my glasses I really had no clue what he was doing. However, when I put my glasses back on, I saw that not only had he cut the front really short and then feathered it, with multiple cascading layers in the back, but that the two sides were completely uneven. I had one lock of hair at my chin, a good two inches shorter than the rest of my hair, and in the back he had cut a shortish top layer leaving the bottom layer almost untouched. As a recoiled in horror, he went about my head with texturizing scissors, continuing his feathering work. I had to tell him about 3 times stop, (the first two times he ignored, like basically everything else I had told him), and finally I jumped out of the chair. "I'm not done" he protested, but I told him it was fine and ran out the door. Dan also found, after putting on his glasses that the man must have thought it opposite day, because he cut it short on the sides and front and long in the back. After we went home (me muttering furiously the whole way), I had Dan cut off the back and attempt to make my haircut look somewhat normal. He was pretty successful (though I still have a hunk of hair in the front about two inches shorter than the rest). I also tried to fix the back of Dan's hair, with a bit less success (though the bald patches aren't really that noticeable from a distance). All in all though, it cements the fact that I'm not going to get another haircut in China again.

Debate

2006-04-10T18:00:00.000+08:00

So yes, I do object. Perhaps I've not been as busy as Britta, but I'm studying Chinese, working out, and brushing up on my philosophy reading skills. (BTW, it looks like I'm going to CUNY next year. Pretty excited.)

I've also been helping out the Ocean University debate team. A friend of mine teaches oral English and Western culture there, and coaches their debate team on the side. They use a Parliamentary format, for those who know about such things. Basically it emphasizes clear arguments, rhetoric, and improvisation, rather than research and furious speed. In addition they are debating in English, so it's excellent oral English practice.

After a couple weeks of schedule conflicts I finally went in for the first time. All of the students were very gracious and friendly, and their English was quite good. I wasn't really sure what my friend had in mind for me, but I mostly take part in debates. In some sense this is really unfair, I'm a native speaker after all. And given the Chinese government's lack of enthusiasm for public policy debate, I'm much more familiar with the relevant arguments than they are. But that's a big reason that they have me, I can help expose them to a wider variety of arguements. Which seems to be an awesome way to instill a democratic spirit. Not that I've come to China with any interest in proselytizing, butI couldn't help but be amused when in a debate I was judging the Chinese team was making arguments based on market forces and the team of two westerners was promoting a socialist solution. Then again, this is modern China.

Now I've gone in three times, and I'm sure I will again, although things are on hold while the two stars of the team are taking part in a national tournament in Beijing. One of them has a classic debate personality, extroverted and confident to the point of cockiness. I was honored to receive from her the nickname "philosophy major egg", since "dan" is chinese for egg.

Overall this whole thing is a nice way to get back into debating, after my unceremonious departure my freshman year of college.

what ever happened to...

2006-04-04T22:54:00.000+08:00

Quick update, to all those people who think we've fallen in a pit/moved to Korea, we are back alive and kicking in Qingdao. I am currently writing/editing a bit for an expat magazine in Qingdao, and I am also tutoring the son of a friend of our roommate, which really deserves it's own blog post. Dan is doing nothing (he'll probably object to that). Actually though, we are also both studying 2 hours a day at the same school we were at before. We are enjoying being back in Qingdao, especially now that we can relax, and we don't have visa/teaching at Lee-wen to worry about.

visas

2006-04-04T22:15:00.000+08:00

We got back from Korea on Friday night, making our trip a total of 8 days in Korea, a day longer than we were planning. On the whole our trip was good, though getting our visas changed did take longer than we expected (hence the extra day). We went to the Chinese embassy on Monday morning, which turned out to be in the middle of nowhere in Seoul. After walking from the subway stop for about 15 minutes, we arrived at the embassy and saw a big gate. Realizing that we weren't going to be able to waltz in, we went to the side where a guard was stationed. Unfortunately, the guard didn't speak any Chinese or English, but luckily he did understand visa. After we said visa, he said something that sounded vaguely like "Pisa? No no" this was a little alarming, but then he pointed to my map, and somehow communicated that we needed to go somewhere else to get our visa changed. Finally after a subway ride and some wandering around (though surprisingly little wandering around, given that we didn't really know where we were going), we found the Chinese consulate (well, first we found a visa service, where we submitted Dan's visa). They weren't able to change my visa, because I wanted a business visa. At the Chinese consulate you really could just walk in, and so I went in to change my visa. I applied for a business visa, but it turns out the business visa would require me to leave the country every month, which was exactly I was trying to avoid. Instead, I ended up getting a three month tourist visa, which is basically what I wanted. I picked my visa up with no problem, but when we went on Wednesday to get Dan's visa, there was no new visa in it. Finally, it turns out they couldn't give Dan a new visa because he had no pages in his passport. A visa has to be placed on a new page, and when we entered korea, they stamped on his last page. Luckily, the people at the consulate were quite friendly, and they gave us the number of the American embassy and told us to go there and add pages. We called the embassy, but by some weird twist of bad luck, it turns out the American embassy is closed on Wednesdays (we started to think poorly of American bureaucracy). At that point we decided that there would be no way to add pages to Dan's passport and get a new visa all on thursday before 2 pm, so we got our plane tickets changed until Friday. Thursday morning, we went to the American embassy, which also had a big enormous gate with barbed wire. It also had a squad of riot police standing at attention. (Well, half of them were standing at attention, the other half were shivering and looking really bored. I guess the American embassy in South Korea is not a hotbed of excitement). We had to wait in a long ling outside, as the police let us in in groups of fives. After proving we were American citizens, we had to go through a security search, and put all electronic devices into a little locker. Finally, we could go into the consulate itself. There we gave the passport to the woman, and she told us to come back at 11:30 (it was about 9:20 am). We told her we had to be at the Chinese consulate by 11, and she told us to wait. Amazingly, by 10 his passport was ready (we began to think more highly of American bureaucracy). We went back to the Chinese consulate, and the next day we picked up Dan's passport with visa.

Korea!

2006-03-29T20:07:00.000+08:00

So, Dan and I have been in Seoul since last Friday, mainly to get our visas changed, but also to see the city and visit some friends. Seoul is an enormous sprawling city of 14 million people, almost a quarter of the Korean population, and it's incredibly Westernized and huge. It also makes Qingdao look like a one-horse town. When Dan and I first arrived, we were like peasants, gawking at the huge sky-scrapers and shops and malls etc. Also, it's amazing how wealthy and clean (and expensive) Seoul seems after China, and also how conformist all the people. Besides shopping and coffee shops, we've also been trying to see traditional Korean culture, including some Korean palaces, the really great National Museum, a hike in a park, some shamanist shrines and temple, and a traditional village. Like most places, the little details are the truly interesting part. It's been a long day, so we'll write about some of those details later.

National Characteristics

2006-03-23T13:50:00.000+08:00

I've been meaning to write this one for a while. In my high-school level class I used to have my students spend some time doing a writing assignment. One week the topic was "you are what you eat". My best student used the opportunity to compare the national characteristics of the major east asian powers based on their cuisine. I wish I had a copy of the original, but I marked and returned it long ago, so I'll have to summarize from memory.

Chinese food is spicy, which signifies that Chinese people are warm and enthusiastic. Japanese food tends to be more bland, which demonstrates that the Japanese are reserves and defer to authority. Korean food involves many different dishes and ingredients, which shows that Koreans consider men to be superior to women, and therefor consider it appropriate for women to spend extraordinary time and effort preparing food.

I'll leave it to you to evaluate the arguments, but I do have to point out two things. First of all, Korean food is much spicier on average than Chinese food. Second, the Chinese people are the only ones who came out looking good, which a cynical reader might find suspicious.

Pineapple, etc

2006-03-18T14:22:00.000+08:00

First the etc. We've probably mentioned in the past that you often find large groups of elderly people practicing tai chi in the morning. Recently, however, I've seen a couple things a bit more unusual. First, one day I was walking to school from our new apartment when I saw the whole staff of a restaurant playing jump rope together. No double dutch, just two guys swing the rope (one of them wearing a chef's hat) and a line of staff passing through. The next day I saw the staff of the restaurant across the street doing tai chi together, accompanied by pop music. Not sure how that would fly in Philadelphia.

This is a really good time to living in Qingdao if you like pineapple. Practically everywhere you can find hand-carts full of pineapples, peeled and unpeeled. The peeling process is really cool. First they scrape off the outer layer. That, of course leaves the pits that dot the surface. What I had never realized before is that the pits are arranged in a spiralling pattern around the fruit. All you have to do is carve out a spiralling wedge around the pineapple and you're left with all fruit and no pit. The end product looks like an aerodynamic nerf football that I had when I was little. At this point they quarter them, stick them on chop-sticks, and sell them for 12 cents. Not bad for a spring snack.

2006-03-15T22:05:00.000+08:00

so our updates have been a little scarce, in part because we are so busy, between threatening to sue our school, arranging a trip to Korea to change our visa, substitute teaching, studying, etc. (Luckily we don't as of now have to actually sue our school, but there is still the remote possibility). Recently, I have been subbing for a friend of mine at a kindergarten. In China, kindergarten includes preschool and day care, the youngest kids at the school couldn't be more than 1 or 2, and the oldest are about 6 or 7. I teach four classes, none lasting longer than 20 minutes. My "older" kids are maybe 4, and the younger ones are 2 or 3. When I teach them, I am not allowed to speak any Chinese, and it's amazing how good their English is, considering how young they are. Of course, they still have a long way to go. Every day I am supposed to ask them what day is it, and everyday it seems, is Monday. Likeways, the weather is always "sunny day." However, the children are incredibly cute. In one class, where the children are younger and a bit less uh, mature than the others, there is a little girl who can't weigh more than about 18 pounds, but she has as much energy as all the other children combined (which is saying something.) One day she pulled my shirt up practically over my head and yelled "white tummy!" in Chinese. In that class, when I get up to leave, about 5 children run up and cling to my legs, saying "teacher, don't leave!" in Chinese it's a nice ego boost, however it's tempered by the fact that they can't seem to tell me apart from their regular teacher. Every time I walk into the class they shout "Emma lao shi!" and it takes a lot of convincement to get them to think otherwise. I guess to them, all blonde foreign women look the same.
Besides teaching at the kindergarten, I also am studying two hours a day. My teacher is really interesting and I really like her a lot. We spend most of our time discussing current events, our lives, and differences between Chinese and American culture. For example, she was shocked by the fact that Americans would put their parents in nursing homes. Besides being negligent and disrespectful, she also pointed out that American adults have no one at home to clean house, raise their children, or cook meals everyday. I guess in China, living with one's parents means having a built in housekeeper, albeit one whoe is somewhat bossy and demanding. She also

Puppies

2006-03-13T16:55:00.000+08:00

The drama of the last few days seems to be winding down, as we finally got paid our Feb money and don't expect much trouble for March. But right now I'm too tired to tell the story properly, so I'll save if for another time.

Earlier today, after climbing out of the tunnel that crosses our neihborhood's main artery, I saw a tight knot of people gathered around a cardboard box. My first thought was "must be some puppies." It's pretty common at that intersection to see people selling any of a wide range of animals: bunnies, turtles, hamsters, etc, along with the ones selling yogurt or handing out flyers. The puppies, though, are the only ones that can attract a circle three people deep.

As a dog lover, I find China a bit disapointing. Nothing against the puppies, but they're just going to grow into fluffy little ankle-biters with wrinkled faces. They make poodles look dignified. I hear in the country people keep scary wolf-dogs, but that's another thing entirely.

Perhaps the strangest thing about pets was something I learned from my little students. In our survey, chickens narrowly beat out cats for the second most popular pet. My TA explained that it was a money thing, they're cheaper than cats or dogs and more lively than fish. Fair enough, although given the disease that's been on everyone's mind, I wouldn't be that eager to pet them.

It can be really hard to quit your job

2006-03-11T11:06:00.000+08:00

Thought that I should get my voice out here, its been a while. The latest in short is that after this weekend and next we'll be done teaching at our school. The problem is that we still haven't been paid for our February work, let alone our March work. After our scheduled payment was postponed for a second time the other day (this time only for the two of us, not the other teachers) Britta and I have become increasingly skeptical about whether our boss intends to pay us a single yuan more. We've been cooperating perfectly up until now, which makes us that much more bitter about our treatment. Hopefully this mess will get resolved amicably in the next several days. We certainly didn't come to China to explore their legal system.

our house

2006-03-03T11:37:00.000+08:00

I don't have much time to write, but I thought I'd just do a quick update. We have almost fully moved in, after several taxi trips with loads of stuff. Our new roommates were shocked by the amount of stuff we had, and the size of our suitcases. Luckily, they let us put one behind the couch in the living room, because otherwise space would be a little tight in our room. Our room is a decent size, though most of it is taken up by an enormous bed. We had to turn our comforter sideways to fit across the width of the bed. Besides the bed, we also have a tv and tv table, a nightstand, a small table and stool, a walk-in closet (a major plus for all of our stuff) and a private bathroom. Our roommates are a 40 something year old woman, who I call "auntie," and a 32 year old man, or "elder brother," with a somewhat ambiguous relationship to each other (lovers? friends? business partners?). They are actually quite friendly, I had dinner with one evening when I was there unpacking my things, and then my elder brother drove me back home in his Ford, or "fo te" They are both in business, and it turns out my auntie is a stock broker, or something like that. They spend much of their time at home watching news, especially financial news, and sometimes I watch it with them and they explain the most interesting things to me. Our apartment is, as I said very nice, and it's on the 17th floor, so there's a really amazing view from the balcony. It's also nice to walk out the door and be near everything, instead of having to walk for 15 minutes to get to a bus stop. Other than that, life is continuing as usual. We may have to go to Hong Kong after we quit to change our visas, but we figure there are worse things than that, because we can take advantage of the time to visit southern china and maybe go to Macau.

random stuff

2006-03-01T11:01:00.000+08:00

I noticed something about personal space the other day. In the bank, like all banks, they have a yellow line painted on the floor with a sign, "please stand behind the yellow line." However, this yellow line is less that two feet from the window, and basically if I were to stand on the yellow line, I would be almost touching the person in front of me who is doing transactions at the counter. To stand this close to anyone in any line would make me feel uncomfortably close, especially at a bank.

women bu shi nuli, er shi laoshi

2006-03-01T10:48:00.000+08:00

So, our lives are getting very exciting, though not exactly in the ways we wanted. Basically our school is starting to turn into "Mutiny on the Bounty," with our boss as the slave-driving captain (hmm...employees unhappy? Maybe I'll just not pay them and threaten to sue them and all their relatives to the nth degree. That'll show them.) However, it is turning into be a good lesson on the differences between America and China when it comes to workers rights, and who knows? Maybe we'll be the first school to form a union in China, or start an investigation that leads to a citywide crackdown in corruption in foreign language schools. (Don't worry mother, I'm not going to do anything too crazy).
Other news, we found a new apartment, which is very centrally located, and really really nice (maybe one of the nicest apartments I've seen). We are renting a room from a hard-driving Chinese business woman. On the surface she seems a bit lihai (formidable), but she is starting to get friendlier, so I am not quite as scared of her as I used to be. The first time we met she didn't crack a smile once, but I think part of that was putting up a front. We will be moving today or tomorrow, so it will be a big change, from living in a 3 bedroom apartment by ourselves, kind of on the outskirts of town (well, not really the outskirts, but on the side of this mountain kind of in the east, so it feels like the outskirts). Between our school and moving and our visa, life has been busy.

Hospitality

2006-02-24T19:15:00.000+08:00

About a week ago I was the foreigner at a Chinese birthday party. Our friend Rachel invited the two of us to her aunt's party, but Britta wasn't able to go. So, after getting off at the wrong bus stop and calling for help, Rachel picked me up and took us to the restaurant. We had our own private room with two table, a dozen people around each. I was at the family table with Rachel, and the aunt was at the other with her coworkers. We started with the cake (I'm sure mom would approve of this), elaborately decorated with a sculpted, frosting monkey on top (because the birthday girl is from the monkey year).

From there we moved on to the dishes, which were about twice as much as we could eat. In addition there was wine (sweet enough to put Manishevitz to shame), Qingdao (aka Tsingtao) beer and the tradition Chinese white liquor (aka paint remover). The traditional role of the host is to stuff and intoxicate one's guest as much as possible, so I found myself drinking all three kinds of booze and getting helpful suggestions for what to eat next from people who had finished eating fifteen minute ago.

Mostly I talked who Rachel and her older cousin, who is a graduate student studying translation. (Her thesis is a comparison of Chinese characters with Egyptian Hieroglyphics.) They kept trying to get their younger cousin to talk with me in English, but she was too shy. Otherwise I got some questions from one of the other cousins at the table. The typical why did you come to China stuff, and the also popular how much does Qingdao beer cost in America, how much does a house cost in America, how much do first jobs out of college cost in America, etc. I left stuffed and a bit buzzed, additional evidence if any was needed that they were good hosts.

Pizza

2006-02-16T16:17:00.000+08:00

Recently we went out to one of the best pizza places in Qingdao. Unfortunately, that means a moderately improved imitation of Pizza Hut? Imitation? you say? Down to the optional stuffed crust pizza.

The next question must be why. Unfortunately, Pizza Hut has convinced much of the Chinese population that they serve the definitive pizza, and therefore the definitive western food. (Britta has had a student ask whether we eat pizza on Christmas in America.) That means that whereever you go in China, its very hard to find a normal thin crust pizza. Fake-tasting cheese and spongy crust are the norm. If you're a Westerner, you're better off taking a break from Chinese food at a Japanese or Korean restaurant. But sometimes you just need some pizza.

Harbin photos are up

2006-02-14T17:50:00.000+08:00

www.flickr.com/photos/tarwinot

I've now reorganized things. All the old photos are in "China 05" and the new ones are in "China 06". Let us know what you think.

2006-02-11T11:01:00.000+08:00

So, Dan has written about the meat and potatoes of our trip in Harbin, mainly the ice and the snow festival. As the Chinese say, "a picture is worth a thousand words," so you'll have to wait until we upload the pictures to really get a good feel what it was like, but it really was truly amazing. The ice sculptures included everything from large palaces made out of ice, which you could climb up the staircases onto balconies--no going inside unfortunately, they were solid--but there was one building that was a good 5 stories. Of course, climbing to the top meant elbowing your way through the mosh pit of other people, all while climbing up steps carved out of ice. And lets just say there wasn't a handicapped accessible ramp (well, actually there was an enormous, two story slide, but think it was only one way). As for mosh pits, Dan's description of getting on the snow pull barely scratches the surface of the true reality: skis became weapons (as well as liabilities, as you could find your self stuck into place by 5 other people standing on your skis) and I'm surprised no one lost any eyes from the flailing ski poles. After one go through the line, in which I luckily got shoved to the front by a well meaning teenage boy, we found it faster to snow plow up the slope with our skis on, and even faster to take them off, walk up, and then put them back on. The slope may have been a bunny slope, but the dozens of people standing or lying in to middle of the slope did kind of create a slolum effect. And after hundreds of skiers going down, the snow was kind of more like a cross between concrete and gravel. However, it was fun and definitely a neat experience. Now at cocktails, I can casually say, "Aspen? Whistler? that's nothing compared to Yabuli, but I suppose that might be above your level." Also, I did not break anything, or get killed by a tree, my two secret fears about downhill skiing.

And now for something completely different. Now that we don't have internet at home, we have two choices: go to an internet cafe, all which seem to have the motto cheap 'n smokey. Though actually, they are really really cheap, only about 18 cents an hour, and they're mainly filled with college students playing video games, watching movies, or talking online. Because the cafes are so cheap, many students just go there to download and watch movies, which is cheaper than buying them on the street, where they cost about a dollar. The other option is to go to a coffee shop, most of which have both computers and wireless access. That does involve buying a 3 dollar cup of coffee, but really, if you're going to drink the coffee anyways, internet is a nice perk. In fact, not having internet or computers in China is much more convenient than in America, probably because so few people do have home computers, but everyone likes to use them, so every corner has an internet cafe, and free wireless access/computers are common in most nicer coffee places. Right now I am at my favorite coffee shop writing this blog. The coffee here is some of the best in Qingdao, the prices are reasonable, and the atmosphere is pleasant. The bad part, (and this is really really bad, kind of on par with all those jokes about where some guy goes to hell and the devil shows him this room and it seems nice and then he says, well, what's the drawback...) is that they play really terrible music all the time. They own about three CDs, the greatest hits of Celine Dion, the Backstreet Boys, and Westlife, this Irish band which is possibly worse than the other two (occasionally they mix it up with equally sacharine Chinese music). Having to listen to Celine Dion once through is bad enough, having to listen to it twice in a row is almost unbearable. And one time, they literally played one song 12 times in one hour, once three times in a row. They also have a large screen where they show music videos. Upstairs doesn't have a big screen, but they do have little flat screen TVs show the videos, and speakers to pipe in the music. I wonder how the employees stand it.

Skiing in Harbin

2006-02-08T15:12:00.000+08:00

First of all, photos of Harbin are coming eventually. We're just not very good at this stuff - too easily distracted.

We went to what Our Lonely Planet book described as the premier ski resort in China, featuring a Dutch lodge feel. There was nothing Dutch or lodge-like about it. We've speculated that the Lonely Planet people must be getting huge kickbacks from various local tourism bureaus.

But anyway. When we arrived the tour guide came down the hall selling 100 yuan tickets. We figured that they were for the skiing, so we buy two. Instead we find ourselves spending the first hour of the trip riding up to and down from one of the highest peaks of the mountain. This would be alright, except for the freezing cold and extended periods of terror. The ski lift was not the most rubust that I've seen. It had a wooden bottom, a vertical bar, and then another piece that swung around to give you places to rest your arms and feet. I'm moderately afraid of heights, so I was a little concerned with how easily it could swing back out. Britta didn't mind as much, and the view would have been very nice if I was in a different state of mind.

It was nice to ski again after so long (its been several years), but the conditions weren't perfect. First of all, to get your skis you had to compete with a crowd of screaming people to get the attention of the equipment people. At that point we go to the bunny slope, which is as far as we could tell the only ski slope open. (There was another hill that was mostly for tubing.) That was alright. We didn't have much time, and neither Britta and I were ready to set the slopes afire. The bunny slope lift is basically a rope with a disk at the end that you can sit on. You get on and it drags you up the hill.

Unfortunately, to get to the lift you have to fight your way through a crowd of impatient people who are wearing skis for the first time. Skis pilled on skis, with everyone trying not to slide backwards on the hard packed snow. The young people weren't bad, but the adults were terrible. There was a middle aged man with no concept of his own limitations, falling down and knocking people over. And then there were the mothers with small children. I got passed by two pairs of them. After one time up the lift we decided we were better of hiking up the hill on our power, and from then on we had a much better time.

The ice and snow festival

2006-02-02T15:50:00.000+08:00

Some Russian architecture and "skiing" aside, the reason we came to Harbin was to see the ice and snow. Riding through the city on a tour bus, peaking through the small patch of window that Britta managed to keep clear of frost, you can see little bits of frozen architecture everywhere. Cute snow sculptures 10 feet high and wider accross, and arches and railings made of blocks of ice. But all the really cool stuff is in a few main parks.

The first we went to was the snow festival. Do to terrible planning we had an hour and a quarter to wander around, and we only managed to scratch the surface. Dragons, cute cartoonish figures, giant penguins (with some actual living penguins wandering around in front), Buddhas and Russian poets. The most impressive, perhaps, were the giant, nearly full-scale buildings. These ones were made out of snow, with elaborate facades, although we later saw even more impressive ones made out of ice.

So later in the day, several hours and scheduling blunders later, we got to the major ice festival. As soon as you enter you see on your right a Parisian building, made out of blocks of ice, of course, decorated to look like a Cartier boutique. As you look around you can see Big Ben, a medieval castle, the Russian winter palace, the arch de triumphe, a statue mounted on a tall column which was apparently from somewhere in Russia, etc. By then it was night-time, and all of the ice was illuminated within by tubes of brightly colored neon.

As soon as we got our acts together we'll post tons of photos online, so I might as well leave things be until then. Britta and I will probably be posting in the next few days, however, to talk about some other aspects of our trip.

back from Harbin

2006-02-01T15:34:00.000+08:00

So, we got back from Harbin early this afternoon, still alive, with all fingers and toes. Our trip to Harbin is really too much to write about in one blog post, so I'll just be brief and then write more later when I feel like it. First, our experience in Harbin was fascinating, incredibly aggravating, but above all very interesting. Do we regret traveling with a Chinese tour group? No. Will we ever do it again? Probably not. In order to decrease the stress of our last vacation where we just showed up in some city and had to find a hotel etc, we decided to do more planning ahead of time and book things through a travel agent. Our agent however, one-upped us and signed us up for a 4 day, 3 night tour to Harbin, where practically every element was taken care of for us. I discovered however, that while feeling total responsibility for logistical planning is very stressful, having your time and money totally in the hands of someone else with no input is also almost as equally stressful, especially when some of those people don't seem quite that competent. The combination of a particularly incompetent tour guide and a large percentage of tourists with a very flexible definition of punctuality meant we spent probably as much time sitting on a tour bus as we did actually seeing the sites. By the end of our final day, we were basically left with Mutiny on the Bounty. However, it wasn't completely a nightmare, and we did get to see a fair amount of Harbin, which is a really interesting city, especially with the ice and snow festival (so if any of you find yourselves in Northern Manchuria in the dead of winter with nothing to do...). In fact, traveling with a Chinese tour group was interesting an interesting experience and it was neat to see China from a Chinese tourist perspective (if that's at all possible). To be brief, the first day we arrived we had free time, then the second day, we went skiing and, somewhat unwittingly, up to the top of a freezing cold mountain peak. The third day we saw the snow festival, ice festival, winter activities, and stores. On the fourth day, we left in the morning. The skiing deserves at least its own post, as does the ice festival/snow festival/details of the tour, so I'll just write a little bit about Harbin and the weather.
Harbin, as I pointed out is in Norhern Manchuria and is the direct recipient of Siberian winds, so needless to say it is cold in Harbin. The third day we were there the high was -19 degrees C and the low was -27, though it was a little warmer the first day. While that seems really really cold, I was surprised that it wasn't as unbearably cold as I thought it might be. As Dan can attest, I packed as though we were heading to northernmost Siberia, and it turned out I really did bring too many woolly socks and sweaters. It didn't help that people in Qingdao are wimps, and wear two layers of long underwear when it gets below freezing, so I was told to expect more than the worst. That isn't to say that I didn't have to layer up: I never wore fewer than 2 layers of fleecy long underwear or 4 shirts or sweaters, less than two pairs of wool socks, and was never out without a hat, scarf, and muffler. I also wore my teacher's knee length down coat which she lent to me (she herself is from Harbin). It was incredibly stylish, with the down as a layer that fit into a black sheath. I also bought a pair of stylish black snow boots with a fake fleece lining in Qingdao for about 8-9 dollars, so I felt like a fairly stylish sausage wandering around the streets. On the whole the cold was manageable, though it was really hard to keep my feet, fingers and nose warm. Basically, they would stay cold until we got back to our hotel room and then only thorougly thaw about three hours later. It was interesting to see what Harbin residents wore though. Most walked around in down coats with hats and scarves, though few people had the scarf wrapped around their face. I wonder, does a nose get used to the cold? Maybe that's the case, because some people seemed downright crazy, walking around hatless, scarfless, and glovelesss with merely a leather jacket. On the plus side though, it really wasn't that windy and it was sunny everyday.
Also, while in Qingdao, people may think I'm Russian, but in Harbin, I got greeted with "dos vadanya" (sp?) almost as often as hello. In one dumpling restaurant, the waitress took one look at us and immediately handed us a helpful Russian menu (luckily it also had Chinese). I guess that's not too surprising, since Harbin was was controlled by the Russians until 1930 and still has a large Russian minority. There were also lots of Russian import stores (including one that we visited with our tour, spending almost as much time at as we did the snow sculpture park, a major point of soreness among all of the people in our tour, including myself and Dan). Another less cheesy Russian influence is in the architechture. Harbin is full of very graceful yellow buildings built by the Russians, and it makes what might be a fairly drab city have a lot of character and charm. I suppose one could also point out that the concrete apartment blocks are also a Russian influence, via that wonderful influence of Stalinist architecture. And speaking of Stalin, one of the most prominent parks in Harbin is named "Stalin Park."
Well, that's it for now, but I (and Dan) will post more later.

xin nian kuai le!!!

2006-01-27T17:16:00.000+08:00

Happy NEW YEAR!!
Today is new year's eve, which means staying up, playing cards, and eating dumplings and candy. It also means wearing red, especially if you are born in the year of the dog (1982) like me. You should say to people, "xin nian kuai le" or "happy new year" or also "gong xi fa cai" (note to my mother: the cantonese version is "gong hey fa choi")which roughly means "become prosperous"

On to other things: So I haven't written in a while, partially because we don't have internet in our house any more (long story), and partially because I've been so busy going to class and doing my homework. For example, over break I have to memorize a Song dynasty poem and write an essay about Harbin. I hope to be able to use some of my new vocab words like, "the beauty of mist rising out over the water" or "to thumb the table and roar with happiness." Sometimes I feel like my vocab words were defined by a non-English speaking Chinese person with a dictionary. My favorite definition was of the word "shi ci," defined as "poetry and ci." I must say, ci has always been one of my favorite literary forms. (It turns out ci is a certain type of poetry with a very strict word scheme, much like a haiku or sonnet). Other than teaching and studying I have been having dinner with more Chinese people, which is really nice. I also went to the beach on Wednesday and shot off many fireworks. It was a bit like fourth of july, except extremely cold (my big toe turned purple), and some of our fireworks were of the type that aren't really legal in America. We had a lot of the ones that shot into the air and then had a big colorful explosion, which was really neat, though a litte scary because it was just right over our heads. There were also lots of fireworks just like the fourth of july, right down to the dud sparklers. On the whole there have been lots of fireworks going up write around the city, and even more fire crackers. Sometimes it feels a little bit like walking in a war zone. "Little new year" or "xiao nian," which falls at the end of a month in the lunar calender passed last sunday, and that day there were so many fireworks we could barely teach over the noise. Following tradition, we also ate dumplings.

New Year's gift

2006-01-26T17:13:00.000+08:00

It seems like I spend a lot of my blog-space writing about unusual food. Perhaps I could do better, but...

The other day the teachers all got a new years gift from the school. It consisted of pounds and pounds of meat. There were some sausages, some of which looked distressingly spam-like (spam-like products are extremely common in China), a piece of beef, a piece of donkey meat, some stomach, some intestine, and some liver. Since Britta and I both got the gifts, that means donkey X2. So what was our boss thinking? I'm not exactly sure. I've heard that many of the Chinese staff members got the same gift, so maybe it was meant more with their tastes in mind. I haven't heard yet whether the vegetarian foreign teacher got the same gift.

Newspapers, etc

2006-01-20T19:20:00.000+08:00

One of my high school students brings in a copy of the major English-language Chinese newspaper and lets me read it during break. They have a regional news summary area, and one of the articles was about a family that had a noisy dog. The neighbors complained, and with the help of the authorities they caused the family to get their dog to quiet down. That's it. Not "man bites dog," not even "dog bits man," the story was "dog barks." There was another good one the other day, about how the Government has decided that innovation is key to growth of the economy. They created a list of innovation methods that they advise businesspeople to strictly follow in order to maximize innovation. The Onion is in trouble.

In my adult class we usually spend the last twenty minutes or so having a conversation / question and answer session. A couple weeks ago one of my students asked whether I saw China as a threat to or an opportunity for America. After I said that I saw it as an opportunity, he said yes, China looks forward to having mutually beneficial relationships with everyone. Except with the Japanese, that is. Don't underestimate how much Chinese people hate the Japanese. Or how much they want to unify with Taiwan, but that's another matter.

Britta and I are now taking classes at a local Chinese language school. For me it is meant to fill the time until Leewen classes resume in the spring, but Britta has been interested in finding a place like this for a while. The classes are $1.25 an hour for a normal class, and $2.50 for a tutorial, although the group classes often have only one other student, if any. I signed up for a 2 hour tutorial, three times a week, only because the most appropriate normal class would have meant studying with a Korean student whose oral Chinese is much better. Britta is in two normals, which means 4 hours a day plus homework. I used to have three hours a day of class while she was relaxing at home, and I can't deny enjoying the role reversal.

Vacation Plans

2006-01-13T18:12:00.000+08:00

Coming up soon is the Chinese New Year, typically called the Spring Festival. Most Chinese people traditionally have a big meal with their families and network with everyone important in their lives. As people get richer many also take advantage of the opportunity to do a bit of traveling, which means that traveling expenses and hassles go way up. Which is a shame, since this is one of our school's few vacations.

Our last big trip was a lot of fun, the only downside being the stress of figuring things out as we went along with only the help of our 5 year old guidebook. (You'd be surprised by how many of Shanghai's museums have moved since then.) This time we decided to do things differently. We'd go to a travel agent, and arrange to join a Chinese package tour. So come the 28th or 29th we will be the two white people in the tour-bus full of Chinese people. (By the way, Chinese and Japanese people actually still consider themselves to be "yellow-skinned," in contrast to white Westerners.)

Since we're traveling at basically the coldest time of year we had two choices. One was to go south and flee the cold. However we didn't want to do the same south-eastern region we'd already explored in the Fall. The Southwestern areas were really tempting. It's very different there, with diverse ethnic minority groups and much less development. However its expensive to get out there, and things are too spread out to see things in only one week. Besides, in Yunnan province, the most interesting in that region, most of the attractions really fill up.

Then we thought about going to Macau. The idea of Portugese-Chinese-Indian-African fusion food had my mouth watering, but it's expensive to get there, and all the package tours also include Hong Kong. We're going to see Hong Kong with my 'rents in the Spring, so there was no need to do that now.

We decided to take the opposite approach. We're going north, to Haerbin. Home of Siberian winds, Lenin Park, hearty food (including some Russian restaurants), what must be extremely painful skiing, a recent benzene spill (which has been cleaned up), and most importantly the famous ice festival. What's not to like?

Winter Food

2006-01-11T11:59:00.000+08:00

The most distinctive winter dish here is translated quite literally as "hot pot." (Britta tells me in Chinese it means "fire pot".) A restaurant will provide individual or communal pots of broth, to which you add thinly shredded raw meat and various other things. Veggies, tofu sheets, seafood, noodles, etc. The first time I had it was over the summer, during my first week here. That wasn't the best introduction. There's a reason people prefer to eat out of a boiling pot of meat broth when it's cold outside.

The second time was very different. We had taken a field trip with the school to buy Christmas decorations. I'm sure we mentioned it. Anyway, we had spent most of the morning freezing, and then we came to this fancy hot pot restaurant where we were escorted to a private dining room. We each had our own little kettles, and following the headmaster's instructions we started by adding a tubular, shell-encased sea slug-looking thing, and one big prawn each. We also had a peanut sauce bowl that we could dip things in. From there it was a beef, lamb and veggie free-for-all.

The third time was with a group of my students. It was just after my first adult class had ended, and the last remaining people took me out to dinner. We went to a fancy kind of hot pot place. In the middle o the table there was a big kettle divided into two sections, one for spicy and one for mild broth. The main attraction was the meat. We didn't even get around to adding most of the vegetables until after everyone was pretty full. The only other star of the meal was a fish head. As the honored guest I had the best part - the most heady part. I asked one of my students if all of the meat was edible, and he said yes, so I went ahead. If its meat in a fish's head, I've now eaten it.

There is one other culinary item that has been an important part of my life recently. You may recall that my Sundays are very busy. I have 10 hours of class, with two 25 minute meal breaks. I need to keep my energy up, so I order the box lunches and dinners that they bring in. Four weeks ago I had an unpleasant surprise when I opened the box. Watery cabbage - edible. Oily eggplant - edible. Fried squares of smelly, boney fish - inedible. And a stir-fry of green pepper, carrots, and these ribbons of a strange, white, textured substance. After checking with one of the teaching assistants I learned that it was lamb or beef intestine - inedible. So I could only eat 2 of 4, plust the rice. Not good, but I thought it would probably be better next week. How wrong I was. The last three weeks it has been the same four dishes again, and I leave the same two untouched. Next week I'm bringing a triple-decker pb and j for lunch.

a little bit of this and that

2006-01-10T22:31:00.000+08:00

So, it's been a little while since we last wrote, but I can't say that we've been all that busy. The weather most recently has been a little bit warmer, mainly in the low forties and sunny. It is supposed to rain later in the week, which won't be all that pleasant. Other than that, the biggest thing in our lives is where we want to go for Spring Festival. Our first thought was to head south to Yunan or Macau, but our friends told us not to go to Yunan if all we had was a week, and Macau isn't out of the picture, but right now it seems a little complicated and expensive, especially where visas are concerned. Our second thought would be to head the other direction, straight up north to Haerbin, where the average temperature in January is -30 degrees celcius. January is however, the month Haerbin hosts the ice festival, which I've heard is really great if you don't mind wearing 5 sweaters. Dan has even agreed to buy a second pair of long underwear. However, we haven't bought the tickets yet, so we may still change our minds. One interesting thing is when I was talking to the travel agent on the phone, I told him I was a foreigner (not that that wasn't already obvious from my imperfect Chinese). At one point in the conversation, he said, "just a moment, I have someone who speaks Korean." Before I could say a word, heard a woman's voice saying "anyang hasaeo" (sp?) (which means hello, and is the only word I know in Korean). I still can't really get over that someone mistook me for a Korean, I guess mainly because face to face that would never happen. It was a little flattering though, because Koreans in general are known for speaking better Chinese than western foreigners.

On another note, I was teaching one Saturday and one of my students, who is five, said to me, "teacher, there's bird flu in Jinan" (the capital of Shandong province). I was a little disturbed by that, and I asked her, "how do you know that?" then she said, "there's also bird flu in Qingdao. People all over China have bird flu! It's everywhere!" Then she smiled and said, "teacher, what is bird flu?" After that, the other students (who are about 10) and I let out sighs of exasperation and continued on. We were talking about last names when again, the 5 year old shouted out, "teacher! what is the last name of people with bird flu!?" I guess that awareness and understanding are two different stages.

Finally, I don't really know anything about Japanese culture beyond my friends' anecdotes and the occasional samurai or anime movie, but I have a feeling some anthropologist could have a field day doing a comparative analysis of Japanese versus Chinese toilets. Pretty much all the toilets I've used in China not in a private home have been squat toilets. The level of sanitation has varied between atrocious to barely adequate, and even in the cleanest toilets there is usually a few drops of urine splattered around the edges. (On the whole though, I would prefer a public squat toilet as it means there is no sitting on the toilet seat dilemma.) Often, the toilet stalls have no lock or no door, and most are byotp and byos, or bring your own toilet paper and bring your own soap. (A small digression: At our school, the one of the woman's bathroom a)has no door and b) has only one stall door for only one of the three toilets. There is also no partition between the other two, and they directly face the outside door, so basically anyone peeing there does so in full view of anyone walking by.) In the winter however, the whole toilet experience has taken on a different unpleasant dimension as it seems few establishments think it necessary to heat the bathroom, which means that one must remove clothing in a room not much above freezing. Even worse is the sink, which shoots out a stream of icy water, which then has to be shaken off of one's hands as quickly as possible to prevent them from freezing in the cold bathroom air. There are a few Korean establishments with Japanese toilets, and this toilet experience is like none I have ever experienced before. The back of the toilet is larger and contains about as many buttons as an expensive washing machine, appearing to perform similar functions. There are detailed instructions in Japanese next to most of the buttons, as well as helpful diagrams, some showing water spraying out of the toilet bowl like a fountain. (Maybe Japanese engineers have carefully built an overflow function into the toilet, saving you the effort of having to clog it yourself.) The toilets also have arms, for comfort and with more buttons if 12 or so on the back of the toilet weren't enough. Also, the seat of the toilet, like those of expensive cars, is heated. The water in the bowl of every single one of these toilets (which I have to admit, is not a large sample size) is unfailingly blue. Since all the Japanese toilets I've seen are in Korean establishments though, I suppose any sort of comparison between bathrooms would only illuminate Chinese-Korean differences. I'm curious however, are these sorts of toilets common in Japan, or are they only the luxury brand toilets, found only in the swankest places or mainly sold for export? Any experts?

my sugar daddy

2006-01-03T00:52:00.000+08:00

and I met in a somewhat ordinary way. I had a friend who was returning to Germany, and she had an offer from a business man to translate for him in Germany. She said no, but then he offered her 5,000 euros and a new cell phone for two weeks of translation, so she decided to reconsider. Her Chinese isn't that great, so she invited me and our other friend to meet him for lunch to translate for her. The lunch was somewhat of a bore, especially for me. At the end we exchanged cell phone numbers, a common formality that often has almost no meaning. However, about 2 weeks later, I got a call from the business man and he invited me out to for dinner and karaoke, as I described in an earlier post. Yesterday he called me up and invited me to his friend's house for dinner, however I didn't really have the time or energy to go, so I cancelled on him, promising to have dinner with him tonight. My cell phone has a notoriously bad connection, and combined with the language barrier, I had a very difficult time understanding what he was telling me on the phone. I met him near the school, and we took a taxi to a Xinjiang restaurant (the muslim autonomous region in the NW of China), where I had fried rice and he told me he already had eaten. At this point I was a little worried. If we weren't going to eat, what were we going to do? (I must admit some rather unpleasant possibilities crossed my mind). He spent most of the meal on his cell phone (which is called the Razor, Motorola's brand new phone about 1/8" thick that can basically perform heart surgery). I told him I wouldn't be able to stay out that late, and he told me we could be home by about 10:30. He told me the car was waiting, so we went outside. The car was black and enormous. The interior was completely black leather, and there was a small tv for the back passenger seats (the TV brand was "Chairman"). The front had a display with a satellite map, clock, weather, CD changer, etc. Between the extremely spacious back seats was a leather arm rest that unfolded with about 10 different types of seat controls. There was also a hidden panel with a space for drinks and cell phones and ashtrays and for basically anything else you could possibly do in a car. The business man removed a list from a compartment which listed how much the interior of his car had cost (which apparently he had just gotten redone). The total was in the 10s of thousands of yuan. I asked him what brand it was, and he said "shuang long," which could be a Chinese brand or a translation of a foreign one. He asked me if I could drive, and I said yes. He then asked me if I could drive stick shift, and I also said yes. I asked him if he could drive, and he said yes, but he didn't have a license, he just had a car and other people drove him around. He told me that I could borrow his car any time I wanted and drive around Qingdao in it, but somehow I don't think I would dare drive a car in an empty parking lot, much less on Chinese roads.

After picking up another of his friends, who to my relief turned out to be a young woman, I found out we were going to a bath house. In China, bath houses are extremely popular, and people often go there instead of hotels. After searching a bit for one that wasn't extremely crowded, we finally found one with space. After entering a lobby, we immediately separated into a men's area and a women's area. We removed our clothes and went into an area with showers, sauna, and massage. It was still crowded so we had to share showers. There was all sorts of shampoo, conditioner, toothbrushes (in plastic wrap, of course), toothpaste, and face wash. The only soap however, turned out to be whitening soap, which everyone knows is exactly what I need for my January complexion. After washing it off, I look closely to see if I was any whiter, but it was kind of hard to tell. After exfoliating, sweating, and whitening, it was time for a massage. I lay down naked on a table and a woman rubbed me with fragrant oil. For the next half hour, she kneaded and pounded every part of my body. It was about 1 part relaxing and 2 parts painful, but I do feel better afterward. After the massage, the other woman and I went out and changed into the bath house clothes, which turned out to be oversized baby cloths. we had disposable socks and underwear, pale yellow pantaloons trimed with lace, and a matching top with puffy sleeves and more ruffles. After donning our incredibly dignified outfits, we went upstairs. The upstairs contained, as far as I can tell, facilities for any sort of activity people in oversized doll clothes might want to do at night (though the men were in slightly less ridiculous hospital gowns). There was a restaurant, bar, karaoke rooms, other rooms which were probably for other activities, and then a large massage room. We went into the room, which was dimly lit and full of the biggest easy chairs I have ever seen. The room was full of semi-comatose people getting feet, head and neck massages, as well as other people sleeping. In the front were two large screen TVs showing some sort of B-grade Planet of the Apes rip-off. We sat down and drank some tea. They asked me if there were many sort of places like this in America, and I said no. The girl said of course, corruption is not nearly as bad, then we all laughed. (As Dan pointed out, these are exactly the type of people I despise in America). I then asked the business man if he had to go to work tomorrow, and he said that he owns his own company, so he really never has to go to work at all. We were going to get foot massages, but by this time it was well past 11, so we went home. He told me to call him any time I was free so he could show me and my friends around Qingdao. Maybe I'll take him up on it, or maybe I'll just call him up to take his car out for a joy ride.

Reading about China

2006-01-02T21:15:00.001+08:00

I was inspired to write a post by reading this sentence, "As for "Sex and the City," its South Korean twin, "The Marrying Type," a sitcom about three single professional women in their 30's looking for love in Seoul, was so popular in China that episodes were illegally downloaded or sold on pirated DVD's."

I don't know how that sounds to people back in America, but I did a double-take. Does that author not realized that EVERYTHING is illegally downloaded and pirated? I'm sure we've mentioned how easy and cheap it is to buy dvds in China (very, and for less than a dollar), but most Chinese college students would never bother to pay that much money. They spend 12 to 24 cents an hour to watch download and watch it in an internet cafe.

Even more naive was a New Yorker article I read a couple weeks ago. It was about a shopping center in Shanghai that pioneered a fashion for retro architecture. The writer claimed that China has no history of either recreating historical buildings or leisure activities in public spaces. If he ever took a tour of historic temples in China he must have been duped. Most of the famous temples are recreations of recreations, most recently from the widescale destruction during the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps he was confused by the fact that this tradition is so deeply ingrained that Chinese people consider an accurate reconstruction to be for all intents and purposes the original building.

As for saying that Chinese people don't participate in street-life, that just made me angry. He claimed that all Chinese street activity is commerce, and the Chinese don't have the concept of the "flaneur" (I looked it up, it means aimless idler or loafer). He obviously never bothered to look, or he would notice the elderly people playing cards in large groups or practicing Tai Chi, and people of all ages (even old people) playing with the Chinese equivalent of the hacky sack. (Instead of a ball it is more like a badminton birdie, I've been told its much easier to use.)Outdoor leisure among all age groups is far more common in China than America.

The article quoted a Chinese man saying that no Chinese person would be willing to eat outdoors." He must have been talking about rich people at fancy restaurants, because I see people eating outdoors every day. When Britta and I were in Qufu the main city square filled with tables and chairs at night, as vendors with large portable kitchens tended to their territories. That's where almost everyone ate. The author must have been taking him completely out of context.

I'm not claiming to know much of anything about China. I've just been here for 6 months, and I can't even carry on a decent conversation in Chinese. The fact that people who are more ignorant than me about China can get published in the New Yorker came as quite a surprise.

Happy New Year! Sorry for the bile, just unloading some that was stored up from 05.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

2006-01-01T02:04:00.000+08:00

So, I guess the title sums it up, but happy new year!!! (or xin nian kuai le! though technically speaking, the Chinese new year is still 28 days away.) So most of you still have another 11 to 14 hours to go, but here in China, we are already 2 hours into the new year. It's hard to believe that it's already 2006, hopefully this new year will be a good one for everyone. As Dan says, 2005 wasn't the greatest in terms of international events, so it isn't asking that much for 2006 to be better. Here's hoping that the situation in Iraq improves for the Iraqi people, ethnic and regional conflicts find peaceful resolution, esp. with the elections in Israel and Palestine, natural disasters stay at a minimum (though perhaps these disasters are a sign from the angry hand of God to a certain unamed goverment...), and that the Democrats take control of congress in the midterm elections (which I'm hoping could have a positive effect on the natural disaster situation.) And of course, good luck to all of you in all of your endeavors!

lao gong

2005-12-31T01:32:00.000+08:00

so, yesterday I also spent all day laying very still on my back sipping Fanta, but this was no food poisoning or stomach flu. No, this was the classic hangover. On Wednesday night, I accepted an invitation to go out to dinner with a wealthy Chinese business man and his colleagues. The meal was in an extremely fancy seafood restaurant (which occupied an entire building). We had a private room with about 15 people in attendance total. Most were either wealthy business men or Communist party leaders. Like any fancy dinner, the host has two goals: 1) impress the guests by enormous quantities of fancy food, and 2) try to drink everyone under the table. According to Chinese custom, it is rude to not drink as much as one's host, or to refuse a toast. The word for "cheers" in Chinese is "gan bei" which means "bottoms up," or literally, "dry the glass," so there's not really much room for sipping. The meal was very interesting, mainly because the star feature of the meal was sea cucumber, which is an extremely expensive delicacy (you can buy gift boxes in the supermarket for about 100 American dollars). Although it looked like a large slug, it actually turned out to be surprisingly tasty, if a bit gelatinous. The meal was paid for by one of the Communist party leaders named Gong, who is known as "lao gong" could mean old Gong, but in this case is a colloquial term for husband. So after about 3 hours, 10 (increasingly full) glasses of expensive white wine, and several peking ducks and sea cucumbers later, we all got up to sing karaoke. We got into a car (the driver seemed to be slightly more sober, or at least I hope) and drove to an extremely fancy karaoke den. In China, karaoke is THE nightime entertainment, and it involves renting a room with a large tv and sound system, and then ordering an array of snacks and drinks. When I go with my friends, the snacks consist of sunflower seeds and the drinks are Qingdao beers and waters. This time, the snacks included carved pineapple sculptures and the drink was Chivas whiskey mixed with sprite and tonic water. You can either take turns or all sing communally, and usually there's a bit of both. Of course, as a foreigner who can sing some Chinese songs, it meant I was center stage for quite a while. As the night went on though, we all became exceedingly drunk, as the nonstop toasting didn't stop. At one point, I remember singing (or by that point I should say drunkenly crooning into the microphone) "The East is Red" with the communist party official. Oh well, at least when I'm really drunk and making a fool of myself, I am still culturally appropriate.

I have one other unrelated funny story about lao gong. I had my class of 5 year olds today, and we were reviewing family members. I asked them what family members they had, and amidst all the shouts of "grandmother!" "father!" etc., one boy said "I have a lao gong!" (which again means husband). My TA and I did a double take, and I asked my student, "who is your lao gong." He said, "my dad is." After that my TA explained that lao gong definitely did NOT mean father.

sheng dan jie kuaile

2005-12-30T14:04:00.000+08:00

"Did it hurt when they nailed Jesus to the cross?"
That was a question I never expected to have to answer, especially not to a 10 year old in China. I suppose I kind of brought this onto myself by trying to give the students a little bit of an idea about what Christmas was about, beyond Santa Claus, christmas trees and presents. I tried to explain that Christians believe that Jesus was the son of a woman named Mary and God. I tried to balance a line between accuracy to the Christmas story without seeming like a creepy missionary, more portraying my story as a "some people believe this..." sort of tale. One of my TAs, who is actually herself Catholic, tried to help out by mentioning that Jesus was the man who was crucified. That perked up the kids interest much more than mention of a pregnant woman and an angel, and soon the questions began. (If you were curious, after some stammering I said that it probably did, and then hurried away). Unlike Dan's students, a fair number of my students did have some idea that Christmas was connected to a man named Jesus, though none of them really knew who he was. When I asked some students who Jesus's father was, one student piped up, "Santa Claus!"
Many students thought that Christmas was somehow connected with the new year. In an attempt to be more ecumenical, I tried to explain about Hanukkah, only to encounter boredom and confusion. In my class of young teenagers, one kid asked what the story behind Hanukkah was. I started off, "a long time ago, there were people who wanted to get rid of all the Jews.." the same kid immediately jumped up and said, "teacher, I know!! I know who they were, it was the Germans!!!" I said no, this was even before them. Ultimately though, they were kind of nonplussed with the miracle of oil burning for 8 days.
In my class of 15 year olds, I branched out even more and tried to tell them about Kwanzaa. I said, "it's a holiday black people in America celebrate to celebrate African culture." The kids however, were much more interesting in talking about black people, which led to some pretty awkward moments. (Ideas of political correctness and racial appropriateness are very different in China.) One boy asked me, "how are black people different from red people?" I asked for some clarification, and he seemed confused. Finally he said, you know, in their hobbies and interests and stuff. Another student asked me if black people were better in sports, and another asked if black people were uneducated. I do have a student in that class who lived in America for 4 years, and she looked about as embarrassed as me.
Well, I must go now, but I'll try to update soon.

Jieri kwaile

2005-12-27T21:49:00.000+08:00

That's how my TA's translate "happy holidays" during our Christmas-themed classes. Christmas-themed? - you ask, in China? Well yes. Chinese people love Christmas. It's western, incourages shopping, and involves bright decoration and candy for children, so what's not to like? Most people don't exactly understand the point of it, which they are quick to admit. My adult class last week asked for an explanation, and not one of them knew beforehand that it had to do with the birth of Jesus. The little kids don't know any more, though many of them believe in Santa. Supposedly one kid told one of our school's teachers that it had to do with Santa's crucifixion. The only ones who know all about Christmas are the teenagers, because they have to read about it in their English-class reading assignments.

Nobody knows about Hannukah by the way, but that's too much to ask. Most Chinese people know that Jews were victims in the Holocaust, are the most clever and business-savvy people in the world, and that Israel is a Jewish state, but that's about it. I typically get a gasp and an appreciative look when grown people realize that I'm Jewish. My TA's have been really considerate, realizing that it would do no good to wish me "merry Christmas". And after I mention Hannukah, I got some "happy Hannukah"s. I even got a "happy Kwanza" which I originally assumed was a joke, but after the second time I explained that Kwanza isn't really a Jewish holiday.

Back to the Christmas lessons in school, we actually only do Christmas activities during the second hour of class. After doing our normal lessor for an hour, we get a delivery of wreath and candy-cane papers to color, sweatened rice-cake "cookies, soda and two little prizes for the best coloring jobs. They all get to go on the three-foot artifical tree in the front of the class. At some point Santa comes in and offers a couple little candy's to everyone.

I didn't feel much inspiration, so I pretty much left it at that. I let the kids who know a Christmas song sing it, mentioned that there's a holiday called Hannukah, and let them color. Another of the teachers had them doing synchronized song and dance routines, but that's clearly out of my league. I have one interesting story to tell about one of her classes, though. Her normal TA wasn't there, so she was left with a rowdy, mostly male class of 10 year olds and an ineffectual replacement TA. When Santa arrived, the inevitable happened. He was mobbed like a deer carcass by hyenas, as the children gorged on his candies. She yelled herself hoarse, but the damage had been done, and much of the candy was already in greedy mouths. In their defense, the children probably didn't have the cultural context to truly understand what they were doing. But most of my kids are much better than that, so don't think that it was typical of what our students are like.

toothpaste

2005-12-22T12:27:00.000+08:00

Dan and I went to buy more toothpaste from a large, international chain supermarket. Dan's favorite toothpaste is Colgate total, so we bought two boxes with tubes of the toothpaste. That evening, we opened up one of the boxes and pulled out a tube of toothpaste, not colgate, but Crest. And not only was it Crest toothpaste in a Colgate box, but it was a mossy greenish color. I looked at the tube and in Chinese, it said it was what I think is "herb flavor" tooth paste. It has a sweet and grassy flavor, which isn't necessarily unpleasant, but I think I would prefer a more minty flavor. To double check, we opened up the second box, and it did indeed contain Colgate total toothpaste. I wonder. Does this prove that all toothpaste is secretly made in the same place owned by some shadowy international toothpaste conglomorate? Now I'm guessing that just might be the case.

horror

2005-12-20T23:11:00.000+08:00

Every once in a while we start talking about food in Chinese class, and the weird stuff they eat in the south. For those who don't know, their are major regional differences in Chinese cuisine. The north (where we are, even though we're geographically somewhat in the middle) is a little spicy and sour, the west is spicy with more ethnic influences, the south is sweet and generally considered the most sophisticated. Guangdong province, the heart of southern cuisine, is also known for the peoples' willingness to eat basically anything. In order of increasing horror:

A dish that translates to something like "dragon fighting with tiger." It's actually snake and cat.

After this it gets really bad. Stop reading if you are prone to have vivid nightmares.

A dish made famous by the second Indiana Jones movie. The brains of a still-living monkey, with the skull-top removed. Add hot oil and serve. It's illegal due to the outrageous cruelty, but still a famous delicacy, so you can still find it in some places.

Then there is a dish called "san ge zhi," which translates to something like "three whimpers." The first is when you pick up the baby rat with your chopsticks, the second when you dip it into the sauce, and the third when you put the still living baby rat into your mouth. Perhaps my teacher was just messing with me, or someone was messing with her, but the sheer possibility that this dish exists is horrifying.

personal update

2005-12-13T19:16:00.000+08:00

I've been kind of at my wits' end recently with the applications and teaching and not much time for anything else. And Britta got sick again, but she's well now and hopefully she'll stay that way. Things are starting to clear up though, with my first application submitted and not much work left for the others.

Meanwhile, I've had some teaching changes. I now have an extra class on Sunday, which means 10 hours of class from 8:30 to 7:30. It could have been worse, since I'm one of the only people to have no Saturday morning classes, and the new class could have been then. But it means that I only have two 25 minute meal breaks during the whole day. Yes, this may seem too dull to describe in detail on the blog, but how else can I complain to so many people at once?

My old adult class ended and a new one began. I had a mini party for our last day, eating fruit and candy while making small-talk. Only one of them so far has enrolled in the next level, but they invited me out for dinner this Friday. The new class is very different from the old one, much more out-going. Most of them are engineers and import-export businesspeople with rather good English. During break two of them asked me to speak faster, which nobody from my old class would have done.

I almost forgot to mention: I learned in Chinese class the other day that Michael Jackson's song "Bad" is translated into Chinese into words that mean "Truly Excellent." I can't decide whether that's a sensible choice or completely misses the point. Your thoughts?

layers

2005-12-13T17:35:00.000+08:00

Qingdao, as I have previously mentioned, is a very cold city, and people seem to dress accordingly. Some people however, seem to go a little overboard, or at least when it comes to their children. While all my children show up looking a little like sausages, when it comes to my 5 year olds, the layering becomes ridiculous. Half-way through class last week, I saw one little boy sitting there with sweat dripping down his face. Even though it was about 75 degrees in the room, he was still wearing his jacket. I made him take it off. Underneath, he was wearing a sweater. I asked him if he was still hot, and he said yes, so I made him take off the sweater, underneath which was--yet another sweater. Underneath that was a padded shirt, and underneath that was another long sleeved shirt. I spied yet another layer under that shirt too. I looked around the room and noticed that about half the children were still in their (down) coats as well, not to mention their padded shirts and jackets and vests and sweaters. I made every one in the room take off at least one layer, if not two (or in some cases, three). We had to put them in the back of the room in a pile, and the pile covered about two rows of desks. Yet about 20 minutes later, some of the children had put most of their layers back on, even though the class room was really warm. Not only do children wear this many layers on top, but they also all wear two or three layers on the bottom as well. Under pants, many children wear padded long underwear or two sets of regular long underwear. I could maybe understand all of that outside, but inside I don't understand why they don't feel ridiculously hot.

2005-12-13T17:08:00.000+08:00

Yesterday was a very busy day for us. First, we got a new sofa out of the blue from the school. Until yesterday, our living room furniture consisted of this oversized wooden bench-like thing with arms and two wooden "arm-chairs" besides being as soft and comfy as a park bench, the slats in the seat were a little warped, making it almost impossible to sit on certain parts of the couch. We had complained earlier, and received what were basically plush bathmats to place on the sofa and chairs. It was a surprisingly big improvement, but only because the starting base for comfort was so low. On sunday however, our boss told us to be home around 10 am because we were getting a new sofa delivered. The next day, some workman and the school owner showed up with the mother of all sofas. It's one of those sofas that wraps around the wall. It came in three parts and was basically was so big that it overlapped with our air-conditioning/heating unit by about 2 inches. (Quick aside. In China, air-conditioning heating units are called "kong tiao," which I just thought meant air-conditioner. This has led to some confusement on my part when people say to me, "oh, don't worry, it's quite warm, it does have air-conditioning after all.") They had to bring in an air-conditioner repairman to have the air conditioner moved over about half a foot. Though back to the sofa: it's a modernist sofa in cream and orange, with a variety of different size, shapes, and patterns of pillows, all variations on cream and orange. The seat of the sofa is orange, the back and sides are white. Maybe soon we will put a picture of it up on the internet. Like pretty much everything in China, it's extra firm, but it is quite comfortable none the less. Also, the back of the sofa has in certain places, orange head rests like those in cars and airplanes.
The other news is that our two roommates moved out after what has basically been a three month process. Our school has two apartments, one which is a 10-15 minute walk from the school, and ours, which is behind Qingdao university a total 25-30 minute walk/bus ride to the school. We are also on the side of a mountain, which makes for very nice views, but we are not all that close to many restaurants or stores. The biggest problem is not that we are objectively that far away, but that it's a 10-15 minute walk to the bus from our house, and it is all uphill on the way home. In return for having a somewhat inconvenient location, we get a washing machine, microwave, toaster, free internet access in the home, rides home at night, and apparently, a very nice new sofa. However, whether these are viewed as outweighing some of the inconveniences is somewhat of an individual thing (and one that I tend to vacillate on myself). Anyways, I'm not going to go into the whole drama, which does involve much more than the housing, but basically our roommates negotiated getting a new apartment in the other complex, and in return, Dan and I will, for the rest of our stay, have a 3 bedroom, 2 bath apartment to ourselves (and of course, a new sofa, which the more cynical might view as a ploy to stop Dan and me from also requesting to move). Unfortunately, it appears that their apartment is a little too new, as it is still under construction. And apparently, besides beds, there is no furniture, the heat doesn't work yet, workmen are there all day long, it smells like strong paint fumes, and the kitchen isn't finished. Our apartment is now quite spacious, what with the new furniture arrangement and no roommates. While in many ways our roommates were good company, in some ways this move could not come sooner because we no longer had any space in our room to put our stuff and had to put it in piles around the room(surprise surprise). Dan says however, that more space does not give me the right to acquire enough stuff to fill it, so I will work on that. (Though I have to say, it is not completely my fault, for example, a student of mine (adult, of course) gave me 4 sweaters from her factory).

2005-12-11T13:15:00.000+08:00

So, I too have not fallen off the face of the planet, instead I have just been faced with a combination of computer malfunction and a lethargy that prohibits me from going to an internet cafe. And also, in the past week or so the temperature in Qingdao dropped about 20 degrees, so now it's inbetween the mid-twenties and high-thirties everyday with a fierce icy wind. Going outside is now incredibly unpleasant and I am avoiding it as much as possible. On the plus side, it is basically sunny everday, although we have had a little bit of snow, though none of it stuck.
Besides the change in weather, the other major development here is that practically every store is now decked out for Christmas, with artificial trees, tinsel, giant cardboard santa heads tacked to the windows, loudspeakers playing christmas music, etc. I think I have now heard "Santa Claus is coming to town" played in front of Popeyes every time I come into work. The ironic thing, of course, is that for all this Christmas cheer, I will actually be working six hours on christmas starting at 8:30 am and finishing at 7:30 pm (with a break in between, of course), as well as seven hours on christmas eve until 8 pm. If no one really celebrates Christmas, I kind of want to know what the point is of all the lavish Christmas decorations, though probably any occasion for people to spend more money is a good enough reason for stores to get excited. And to be honest, many places have Christmas decorations up year round, particularly cheap restaurants. Our school too, has santas on all the doors and christmas lights in the lobby year round. We went with the school to buy more christmas decorations, but as the school pointed out, we really didn't need all that much more.
Other than that, nothing terribly exciting has happened. I am sick again, though not as bad this time, and the only thing that seems to settle my stomach is Fanta and potato chips, so I am sitting at the computer guzzling my second can of Fanta. As my friend pointed out, both of them have a very high sodium content, and it could be my body's way of replacing the salt I am losing. I do find it strange that Gatorade, which is specifically designed as a rehydration drink, would still make me nauseous. Maybe if this keeps up I can get endorsements from Lays and Fanta.

A story from a student

2005-12-09T20:02:00.000+08:00

No, I didn't fall off the face of the earth. I've just been obsessing about grad schools. My first one should be done soon, and the rest of them are mostly done, so Iｔａｋｅ　ａ　ｍｏｍｅｎｔ　ｔｏ　ｓｉｔ　ｂａｃｋ　ａｎｄ　ｃｈａｔ．

Ｔｗｏ　ｗｅｅｋｓ　ａｇｏ　ｔｈｅ　ｔｅｘｔ　ｉｎ　ｍｙ　ｈｉｇｈｓｃｈｏｏｌ－ｓｔｕｄｅｎｔ　ｃｌａｓｓ　ｗａｓ　ａｂｏｕｔ　ａ　ｍａｎ　ｗｈｏ　ｄｉｓｃｏｖｅｒｅｄ　ｈｉｓ　ｌｏｎｇ－ｌｏｓｔ　ｂｒｏｔｈｅｒ　ｗｈｏ　ｗａｓ　ａｓｓｕｍｅｄ　ｔｏ　ｈａｖｅ　ｄｉｅｄ　ｉｎ　ｗｏｒｌｄ　ｗａｒ　ＩＩ．Ｈｉｓ　ｗｉｆｅ　ｄｉｓｃｏｖｅｒｅｄ　ｔｈｅ　ｂｒｏｔｈｅｒ　ｗｈｅｎ　ｓｈｅ　ｎｏｔｉｃｅｄ　ｈｉｍ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｓｔｒｅｅｔ．　Ａｆｔｅｒ　ｃｌａｓｓ　ａ　ｓｔｕｄｅｎｔ　ｃａｍｅ　ｕｐ　ｔｏ　ｍｅ　ｗｉｔｈ　ａ　ｓｔｏｒｙ　ｔｏ　ｔｅｌｌ．　Ｈｉｓ　ｆａｔｈｅｒ　ｗａｓ　ｂｏｒｎ　ｄｕｒｉｎｇ　ｔｈｅ　ｃｕｌｔｕｒａｌ　ｒｅｖｏｌｕｔｉｏｎ．　Ｈｅ　ｗａｓ　ｏｎｅ　ｏｆ　ｔｗｏ　ｔｗｉｎｓ，　ｂｕｔ　ｔｈｅ　ｏｔｈｅｒ　ｔｗｉｎ　ｗａｓ　ｓｕｐｐｏｓｅｄ　ｔｏ　ｈａｖｅ　ｄｉｅｄ　ｄｕｒｉｎｇ　ｃｈｉｌｄｂｉｒｔｈ．　Ｔｈｉｓ　ｗａｓ　ｎｏｔ　ｕｎｕｓｕａｌ，　ｓｉｎｃｅ　ｐｅｏｐｌｅ　ｗｅｒｅ　ｓｔａｒｖｉｎｇ　ａｎｄ　ｔｈｅ　ｃｈｉｌｄ－ｍｏｒｔａｌｉｔｙ　ｒａｔｅ　ｍｕｓｔ　ｈａｖｅ　ｂｅｅｎ　ｈｏｒｒｅｎｄｏｕｓ．　Ａｎｙｗａｙ，　ｔｈｅ　ｍｏｔｈｅｒ　ｗａｓ　ｎｅｖｅｒ　ｃｏｎｖｉｎｃｅｄ　ｔｈａｔ　ｔｈｅ　ｃｈｉｌｄ　ｄｉｅｄ，　ａｎｄ　ｊｕｓｔ　ａ　ｆｅｗ　ｗｅｅｋｓ　ａｇｏ　ｔｈｅ　ｓｔｕｄｅｎｔｓ　ｆａｔｈｅｒ　ｗａｓ　ｔａｋｉｎｇ　ａ　ｔｒｉｐ　ｔｏ　Ｓｈａｎｇｈａｉ　ａｎｄ　ｎｏｔｉｃｅｄ　ａ　ｍａｎ　ｗｈｏ　ｌｏｏｋｅｄ　ａ　ｌｏｔ　ｌｉｋｅ　ｈｉｍｓｅｌｆ．　Ｎｏｗ　ｈｅ　ｉｓ　ｔｒｙｉｎｇ　ｔｏ　ｆｉｎｄ　ｔｈｅ　ｍａｎ　ｓｏ　ｈｅ　ｃａｎ　ｃｏｎｆｉｒｍ　ｗｈｅｔｈｅｒ　ｔｈｅｙ　ａｒｅ　ｔｗｉｎｓ．

Ｓｏｍｅ　ｍｏｒｅ　ｆｒｏｍ　ｔｈａｔ　ｃｌａｓｓ　－　ｌａｓｔ　ｗｅｅｋ　Ｉ　ｗａｓ　ｔａｌｋｉｎｇ　ｗｉｔｈ　ｔｈｅｍ　ａｂｏｕｔ　ｔｈｅｉｒ　ｎｏｒｍａｌ　ｓｃｈｏｏｌ．　Ｉ　ａｌｒｅａｄｙ　ｋｎｅｗ　ｔｈａｔ　ｈｉｇｈｓｃｈｏｏｌ　ｉｎ　Ｃｈｉｎａ　ｉｓ　ａｂｓｏｌｕｔｅｌｙ　ｍｉｓｅｒａｂｌｅ．　Ｔｈｅｙ　ｐｒｅｐａｒｅ　ｆｏｒ　ａｎ　ｉｍｐｏｓｓｉｂｌｅ　ｔｅｓｔ，　ｗｈｅｒｅ　ｔｈｅｙ　ｗｉｌｌ　ｃｏｍｐｅｔｅ　ａｇａｉｎｓｔ　ｔｈｅ　ｒｅｓｔ　ｏｆ　Ｃｈｉｎａ＇ｓ　ｓｔｕｄｅｎｔｓ　ｆｏｒ　ｔｏｏ　ｆｅｗ　ｓｐｏｔｓ　ｉｎ　Ｃｈｉｎａ＇ｓ　ｂｅｔｔｅｒ　ｕｎｉｖｅｒｓｉｔｉｅｓ．　Ｍｏｓｔ　ｏｆ　ｔｈｅｍ　ｄｏｎ＇ｔ　ｈａｖｅ　ｈｏｂｂｉｅｓ　ｏｔｈｅｒ　ｔｈａｎ　ｐｌａｙｉｎｇ　ｖｉｄｅｏ　ｇａｍｅｓ，　ｓｉｎｃｅ　ｔｈｅｙ＇ｒｅ　ｔｏｏ　ｂｕｓｙ　ｄｏｉｎｇ　ｈｏｍｅｗｏｒｋ．　Ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ　ｃｌａｓｓ　ｃｏｎｓｉｓｔｓ　ｏｆ　ｔａｋｉｎｇ　ｎｏｔｅｓ　ｗｈｉｌｅ　ｔｈｅｉｒ　ｔｅａｃｈｅｒ　ｌｅｃｔｕｒｅｓ　ｔｈｅｍ　ｉｎ　Ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ．　Ａｆｔｅｒ　ａｓｋｉｎｇ　ｉｆ　ｔｈｅｒｅ　ａｒｅ　ａｎｙ　ｃｌａｓｓｅｓ　ｔｈｅｙ　ｅｎｊｏｙ，　Ｉ got blank looks. I　ａｓｋｅｄ　ｔｈｅｍ　ｉｆ　ｔｈｅｙ　ａｔ　ｌｅａｓｔ　ｌｉｋｅ　ｌｕｎｃｈ　ｔｉｍｅ，　ｂｕｔ　ｔｈｅｙ　ｔｏｌｄ　ｍｅ　ｔｈａｔ　ｔｈｅｙ　ｓｐｅｎｄ　ｉｔ　ｄｏｉｎｇ　ｈｏｍｅｗｏｒｋ．　Ｐｅｏｐｌｅ　ｉｎ　Ａｍｅｒｉｃａ　ｏｆｔｅｎ　ｔａｌｋ　ａｂｏｕｔ　ｔｈｅ　ｓｔａｒｖｉｎｇ　ｃｈｉｌｄｒｅｎ　ｉｎ　Ｃｈｉｎａ，　ｂｕｔ　ｎｏｔ　ｅｎｏｕｇｈ　ａｔｔｅｎｔｉｏｎ　ｉｓ　ｐａｉｄ　ｔｏ　ｔｈｅ　ｏｎｅｓ　ｗｉｔｈ　ｔｏｏ　ｍｕｃｈ　ｈｏｍｅｗｏｒｋ．

mocha

2005-11-28T22:52:00.000+08:00

the other day, i went to a coffee shop and ordered a mocha (cost: 20 yuan, or about $2.50). after about 20 minutes, the waitress gave me a small cup of black coffee, a pitcher of cream, and a packet of sugar. i turned to her and said, "i'm sorry, there must be a mistake. i ordered a mocha." she told me. "oh, this is a mocha." i tasted it and sure enough, it tasted like mediocre black coffee, so i turned back to her and told her that it definitely was not a mocha. she took it back up and came back about two minutes later with the same cup of coffee. she told me that she asked the woman and it was a mocha. i told her that usually a mocha was made with chocolate and steamed milk. she said, "well, our mochas don't have chocolate in them. we can add chocolate powder to your mocha if you want" i asked her what the difference was between the mocha and a regular cup of coffee (besides the price, of course. she said to me, "the mocha is made with mocha beans, of course." then she said, "our mocha is hand made, and the regular coffee is machine made." at that point it i decided it was futile to argue, i just made a mental note never to go back to that coffee place again.
that's one of the surreal things about china, is that most people who make or sell western products really have no clue what the names mean, and so there's sort of an orwellian (or as some people might say, postmodern) redefining of products. i have had people with completely straight faces insist that a margarita was a strawberry daiquiri and that a piece of toast with spam on it was pizza. there's no point in arguing, or pointing out that it isn't the case, because assumptions that are commonly held about what the definition of something like a mocha or pizza or a cocktail just simply don't exist. though maybe if a chinese person went to some chinese restaurants in america they might feel the same way.

also as an update, i am completely recovered now.

2005-11-20T21:51:00.000+08:00

"dear leewen, please excuse comrade ingebretson from work today. she is very sick and needs two days bedrest. --doctor wang, shi li hospital"

well, that's not exactly what the note said, but it did say that "comrade ingebretson" needed two days bedrest. yes, in my efforts to increase my familiarity with qingdao, i decided to take an all-day field trip to one of qingdao's top hospital's emergency rooms.
on thursday night i went out for my usual evening of bowling and beer drinking. i came home around midnight, and began to feel a little nauseous. at first i thought it might be from drinking beer, which i found a little surprising since i hadn't drunk more than one qingdao beer (not known for high alcoholic content) nor had i eaten anything particularly unusual or unsanitary that day. i will spare you all of the unnecessary graphic details, but i basically think i came down with a particularly nasty case of the stomach flu. i didn't get any sleep thursday night, and dan decided to take me to the hospital early next morning, mainly because i was unable to keep any water down. we got to the hospital around 6:45 am, and walked in to a darkened lobby with no sort of staff in any kind of attendence. we went to the second floor to see if the international clinic was open (it wasn't) and ran into another patient who told us to go to the 6th floor. we arrived at the 6th floor to find a lit desk, a sign that said "nurses station" and of course, no nurses. dan went off to find a nurse while i squatted on the floor because there were no chairs or any sort of seats in the waiting area. finally a nurse came out and told us that we could wait for the international clinic to open at 8 (over an hour) or go to the chinese emergency room. we went to the emergency room, which turned out to be a room, with two somewhat dingy examining tables and two desks. the doctor came in and asked me what my symptoms were, and then pressed on my stomach and asked me where it hurt. he then wrote up some notes and my medications, and told me what he was going to give me through an i.v. now, if medication names are slightly incomprehensible in english, they were completely incomprehensible in chinese, so i just nodded and smiled and hoped that he didn't just say he was going to inject toxic waste into my veins.
another note about our hospital is that they are run by the chinese communist party, which means that it is staffed by fairly hostile beligerent staff who have better things to do than explain hospital procedure to ignorant foreigners. the hospital, unlike american hospitals, was pay-as-you-go, which meant that while i was getting my exam, a nurse came in to yell at us for not having payed the registration fee or picked up any forms(11 yuan, about $1.25). after we managed to let her know that a)i spoke chinese but was not about to leave the examination table, and b) dan was willing to go but didn't speak any chinese, she sighed a heavy sigh and grabbed dan's arm to go and get me registered. when we got back, it was time for the nurse to escort dan off again to the pharmacy and buy my medicines. meanwhile, a nurse escorted me to one of the rooms in the emergency ward where they would administer my i.v. the room turned out to be straight out of the 50s, a bare white room with four metal frame beds in a row, all with dingy (though not unsanitary) cotton bedding. above each bed was a string to pull to call a nurse, and next to each bed was a table and an i.v. stand. the nurse put me in the bed by the window. i went to go to the bathroom, which had the hygenic standards of a cheap restaurant. the toilets were dirty and there was no toilet paper. the sink only had cold water and no soap, and on one side there was a trough filled with dirty mops. on the whole, it was not a bathroom that inspired confidence. back in my room, the nurse hooked me up to the i.v. with only minor difficulty (she missed my first vein), and then left me and dan.
we were soon joined however, by a woman of about 60 and her somewhat senile elderly mother who was put in the bed next to me. at first she said in a loud, exaggerated voice, LOOK MOTHER, FOREIGNERS. LOOK AT HER HAIR. FOREIGNERS ALL HAVE DIFFERENT HAIR LIKE THAT. the mother seemed confused, and said that we looked different. the woman responded, WELL OF COURSE THEY'RE DIFFERENT, THEY'RE FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. HE'S FROM XINJIANG OR SOMEWHERE LIKE THAT (an autonomous region of china with a turkish ethnic minority). then she asked dan if i was his wife. dan looked confused, so then she tried out fiancee, and finally girlfriend, and dan said that i was. some more people came into the ward, and the woman said SHH, FOREIGNERS, YOU NEED TO BE QUIET BECAUSE A FOREIGNER IS SICK. then she asked dan what was wrong. dan managed to communicate that it was my stomach, and she gave a knowing tut tut and told him that i needed to eat more carefully. she then read my chart and told dan that one side effect of my medication was dry mouth, and he needed to give me some water. when she found out we didn't have any cups, she again was horrified. HOW WILL YOU TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES?? YOU NEED TO GET A CUP IMMEDIATELY! she hurried dan out and several minutes later they came back with a paper cup and two bottles of water. dan opened a water bottle and was about to pour when the woman again got really agitated and said WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING? YOU CAN'T GIVE HER COLD WATER, IT'S BAD FOR THE STOMACH. SHE NEEDS WARM WATER!(there is a belief that cold water gives people stomach aches, and all water needs to be at least luke warm). at this time i stopped feigning sleep and woke up and drank some luke warm water, and i was actually very grateful to the woman because i was very thirsty. when the woman found out i spoke more chinese than dan did, she began her round of questioning all over again. when she found out we mainly ate out instead of at home, she again tsk tsked, basically telling us that we had brought misfortune upon ourselves. all in all, it was like having a somewhat overbearing grandmother around taking care of me, which was occasionally exasperating but mostly nice.
another highlight of my 12 hours in the room was one time after i threw up, i called in the nurse and told her. she told me to save my bucket of vomit(it was a byob, or "bring your own bucket" emergency room) to show the doctor. (i'm not trying to be too graphic, but it's part of the story, so bear with me a moment) i had taken some pepto-bismol, a bright pink stomach medication, and my vomit was similarly colored. the doctor took a look and was incredibly horrified. "what did you eat!!??" she yelled at me, and i tried to explain that i had taken a medicine at home to prevent vomiting. the doctor took another look and said, "i don't know what that is, but never take it again. if you get sick, just come here immediately" and then walked out. meanwhile, everyone else in the ward came over to take a look and add their own versions, of "what were you thinking," "trying to poison yourself" "how unnatural" etc. then a little bit later when i tried to suck on a vitamin c candy to get the vomit taste out of my mouth, the grandmother figure caught me and said LOOK WHAT YOU'RE DOING NOW! DIDN'T YOU HEAR THE DOCTOR? SHE SAID NOT TO EAT ANY STRANGE FOODS, WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TO YOURSELF? YOU DON'T NEED TO TAKE ANY VITAMIN C, IT'S IN THE I.V. STRANGE FOODS LIKE THIS, NO WONDER YOU'RE SICK.

on the whole, when i wasn't sleeping it was a fairly interesting 12 hours.

sushi and an ERDCM

2005-11-17T15:15:00.000+08:00

Today after Chinese class I met Britta to go get sushi with a couple of her friends. Most of the people in the restaurant are rich Koreans or Chinese people, since all the food (except the dish that we order) is quite expensive. For example, the two guys sitting at the table next to us must have spent a fortune on their pairs of raw fish slices on mounds of ice, soups, vegetables, bottle of booze, etc. Towards the end of our meal one of them came over, and thus began our ERDCM, or Encounter with a Rich Drunk Chinese Man.
First he walks over and asks us where we're from, which turns out to be rather surprising, since two of us are American, one Italian, and one German. Then he wants to know how it is that we are all friends, since we are from different countries. This already had the makings of an ERDCM, but my hunch was confirmed when after getting to know us for about three minutes he asks if we want to be his friends. ERDCM's aside, this seems to be quite a normal thing to say to someone in China. The unusual quality here was that he said it rather loudly to a group of strangers, and all the guests at the restaurant were staring at us.

food food food...

2005-11-14T17:57:00.000+08:00

i just got back a little while ago from a goodbye lunch for a friend of mine who's going back to england in two days. we went to an all-you-can eat buffet in one of qingdao's five star hotels. there for about 12 dollars you get as much as you want of western, japanese, chinese, korean, and indian cuisine. to tell the truth, the western and indian food is ambitiously fancy yet somewhat mediocre, however, it's the only indian food, and basically some of the only western food that isn't poorly done pizza and spaghetti, so it's always nice to do for a splurge every once and awhile. however, cash splurging is only one kind of splurge, it's more the food splurge that's deadly; i am writing this in a sleepy stupor, and feel no desire to eat for the next week. we all had about 8 courses each, all involving a mixture of sushi, cheese, bread, roast beef, samosas, tandoori chicken, pretzels, salad, croissonts, raw salmon, cheese cake, chocolate mousse, ice cream, coffee and fruit salad.
though one quick note; the roast beef was tender and flavorful, and the rye rolls were firm and chewy, a nice change from the soggy and tasteless "french bread" many bakeries and western restaurants sell.

well, off to take a nap now.

photos update

2005-11-12T11:21:00.000+08:00

the new photo location is flickr.com/photos/tarwinot. There are now 59 China photos online.

2005-11-12T11:13:00.000+08:00

My youngest class consists of students who are all, as they tell me, five and a half years old. (well, two exceptions, a 6 and a 7 year old). Even though they know their age down to the month, 9 out of 10 don't know what year they were born in. However, when I asked them what zodiac sign they belonged to, they all knew immediately. "Dragon teacher!!! I'm a dragon!!" they all screamed. I think that's interesting, I would think that knowing what year one's born in would be easier to know than one's zodiac sign. I don't really remember, but when I was 5 I'm pretty sure I knew what year I was born in, but I definitely wouldn't know my astrological sign or any sort of equivalent thing. Though I guess the zodiac in China is a bigger deal than the astrological calender in America. On a side note though, people do follow our monthly astrological calender as well. In fact, people often ask me what sign I am. I've tried and repeatedly failed to remember the word for sagittarius, so I just mimic shooting a bow and arrow, and they understand.
But getting back to teaching, I have to say that there are lots of benefits to teaching little children, mainly that they are incredibly sweet. I often get little gifts of soggy cookie, lint-covered candies, an scraps of paper that say, "I like teacher" in Chinese with a picture of me in a pink dress and of course, copious amounts of flowing blonde hair. They are also very physically affectionate, and often run up and spontaneously hug me.

Photos, etc

2005-11-10T14:38:00.000+08:00

Want to see some photos? http://flickr.com/photos/51035598839@N01/
So far it's only trips from our trip to Hangzhou and Suzhou, but more is coming.

A friend asked me about interacting with Chinese people, and the intercultural issues there. So here are a few stories.

First of all, we have a very friendly security guard (the guy with siblings from Britta's post) who often talks to Britta as we enter our buildings complex (every nice apartment building here has a gates and security guards). The topic of food came up, and he volunteered to show us how to cook a Chinese dish if we cooked a Western one. So a few weeks ago he came over and made us dumplings. In general, he was shocked at how incompetent we were at doing everything (what, you call yourself a man and you haven't mastered the double-knife meat chopping technique). And he couldn't get over the fact that I can't speak Chinese, especially since my girlfriend can. He is not really typical of most people we meet, though, since he comes from a poor, rural family.

Then there is a student of mine from my adult class. He is probably in his late twenties, I think he is a salesman in a store. He noticed that before class I am often working on my Chinese homework, so he offered to come early to help me. I suggested that he come a half-hour early, but instead he started coming 45 minutes to an hour before class. Yesterday I offered to take him out to dinner in order to thank him. At first he was adamant, saying that I was a guest here in China and it was his pleasure to help me. I replied that it was my pleasure to take him out, which eventually convinced him.

In my experience Chinese people are often unwilling to take more from Westerners than they give. For example, the friend of Britta' who we often go out to dinner with always manages to pay slightly more than her share despite our best efforts, and the well-known fact that we are much better paid. And yesterday I offered to take out to dinner another student from that class and his friends, the group of friends that took me out last time. Chinese custom is for one person to pay for the whole meal, and for a group of friends to take turns. But when I said I wanted to take them out and pay this time, he resisted and suggested I pay half. We'll see how that goes.

library

2005-11-06T14:22:00.000+08:00

so, as i have already written about, every wednesday i go to the library to read chinese magazines. recently i have discovered this magazine called 'china,' which is basically like the newsweek of china. it's perfect reading, the articles are all about 1-3 pages, which is a good length, given my slow reading speed, and they are much much more interesting than the newspaper, which mainly has articles on things like traveling car shows. i read this really fascinating article called 'second child hopes,' which was all about the 1 child policy. the article identified about four major trends in chinese society. the article said that many people, generally the urban middle class, really only want one child. raising a child is expensive and time consuming, and most people feel they can't maintain their lifestyle and have more than one kid. of course, maybe it's kind of a chicken-and-egg phenomenon, because after all, having only one child meant parents (and grandparents) could lavish their kids with piano lessons and golf lessons and extra math tutors and english lessons and dance lessons and cell phones, etc. but now, it's kind of become a vicious cycle: if you want your child not to fall behind, you need to make sure that you provide lots of expensive extras to make sure your child becomes accomplished and successful. (dan has 7 and 8 year olds who are taking journalism lessons to give them poise). also, many people are concerned about china's overpopulation problems and many of the practical problems that resulted. as my friend said, for her, getting into college was a stressful overly competetive nightmare, and grad school is just as hard, given that there are too many qualified people for not enough spots.--she said that she would do anything to make sure her child's life will be easier, and that the best way of doing that was only having one child. that many people support the law for socially conscious reasons shouldn't be surprising, yet the way we talk about it in america, it's as though it's merely yet another form of oppression heaped upon a long suffering people. (when i told that to one of my students, she laughed, and said that americans were really different). of course, the article mentioned that many people want a second child, but they can't afford to pay the fine (about $1200) for having a second birth. in chinese, there's a saying "you er you nu cai suan hao ming" or, only when you have a boy and a girl do you have a good life. not having a birth certificate, aka having an illegal birth means that your child cannot get a residence permit or legally enroll in school, which pretty much guarantees that your child will be on the fringes of society. of course, the article pointed out that many people do have more than one child, mainly wealthy people for whom 1200 bucks is nothing, and people from small villages who often have extra children outside of the law. some people are allowed to have more kids, especially in the countryside. for example, if your first child is a girl, you are allowed to have another. though sometimes, the article said, it means there are single child families with one boy, and parents who desperately want a girl. of course, in the country there are also many families with two girls who really want a boy.
it's interesting, two questions i always ask people are "how many siblings do you have?" and/or "how many kids do you have?" many people answer, one, of course, there's a single child law. however, when i asked our security guard how many siblings he had, he said two, a younger brother and sister. i asked him how his family was able to have three kids, and he just gave me a puzzled look and said, why wouldn't my parents be able to have more than one kid? i was very confused.
this week i started an article on food safety in china, which i don't know if i really should talk about on the blog, i mean, i'm not sure if i really want to read about it myself. somehow finding out much of my food is produced in unsanitary conditions near open cesspits isn't exactly what i want to know, considering i don't really have the option of not eating. in this case, ignorance is bliss--though actually, the statistic in the article that every day, 500 people get food poisoning in china actually seems really low, considering--1) the hygienic standards at most restaurants i've seen, and b) that there are 1.3 billion people in china.

life as usual

2005-10-31T18:43:00.000+08:00

ha! how ironic. as i was trying to save the post i just wrote, knowing that there was a good chance it would be deleted, i accidentally deleted it. so after a bunch of kicking the ground and cursing, here i am re-writing my post.
basically, it never rains but pours, and my social schedule has gone from basically nonexistant to off-the charts busy. last wednesday, i went to a book group meeting. it meets once a month in a restaurant and we try to read quality modern english-language literature, which is hard to find in qingdao--the english language sections of bookstores are always filled with "classics," often rewritten in simple english for esl students, which means if you're not interested in an abridged version of "a tale of two cities" or something like that, you're bascially out of luck. the head of the book club finds english books and then has them photocopied, and then we all just read the photocopied book, which is the really only feasible way to get bulk copies that isn't prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. i just joined so i didn't get a chance to read last meeting's book, but the book for next time sounds interesting, it's by an indian-canadian author (i don't know if that's native american of south asian) that several people in the group had read and highly recommended. there were about 15 people, and i was the youngest person in the group by a bit, most people seemed to be in their 30s, but it's nice to meet other westerners whose idea of a good time isn't getting really drunk all the time.
on another social front, i have also made to female friends my own age, which is nice because many of the women i've seen at bars look about as friendly as pitbulls and completely uninterested in meeting other women. my one friend is studying chinese at qingdao university. she's been in qingdao only for about 2 months, but lived in kunming two years before teaching english and german. she's technically italian, but is from the culturally austrian part of the tyrolean alps. my other friend studies chinese medicine here, and is from berlin. it's nice to meet other girls who have similar interests as me. i've also met this woman from england who is really nice and who i also have lots in common with, but unfortunately she's going back to england in about 3 weeks.
also, this weekend was halloween, which doesn't mean all that mush if you're chinese, although there is a chinese word for halloween, it's "wan sheng jie," "or 10,000 spirits holiday." the foreigners in qingdao do dress up and have a party, so my italian friend and i went shopping for costumes this past friday. we went to this market known for cheap and gaudy clothes, which there definitely were (though not as cheap as they ought to have been, considering the outrageous markup some saleswomen tried to charge). i ended up with a hideous white satiny skirt for about 10 yuan, as well as some fake flowers and beads. we decided to be angels, and so we also bought some cotton and my friend got a white sheet to make a skirt. though after lots of experimentation, we couldn't get the skirt to look anything like an old sheet wrapped around her waist, so she ended up wearing a different skirt of mine. our wings turned out well, we cut them out of cardboard and glued cotton onto them. they looked really good, except after about 20 minutes in a crowded bar much of the cotton fell off.
dan wins the prize for best costume, he dressed up as a french man. he wore a striped 3/4 length sleeve boatneck shirt, my incredibly petite roommate's jeans and her white belt, a neckerchief, white socks, and a beret. he looked both incredibly ridiculous yet strangely good. dan wasn't as convinced about the "good" part, even though numerous people told him he should dress like that more often. it seems in an international community of europeans, australians, and americans, the one thing we all seem to do is make fun of the french. (the french students studying here did not seem that impressed by the outfit however. that seems to be a general trend though, with me and my friends attempts to impress them with our deep knowledge of french language and our beautiful renditions of french songs.)

Food

2005-10-28T21:39:00.000+08:00

This is long overdue. If I was reading a blog about China, food is probably what I'd want to hear about, so here it is.

Tonight I went out to dinner with a student of mine and three of his friends. He goes to the Qingdao College of Science and Technology, and he and all his friends study biology.

Ok, to the food. First there was a fish dish, often the highlight of a Chinese meal, especially in a coastal city like Qingdao. There were pieces of fish in a flavorful broth, with some veggies and ginger and several little cornbread biscuits. Sometimes Chinese fish dishes can be very bony, or the flesh can be a little soft, but this was very nice.

Next a corn dish arrived. It was a cold salad of corn kernals with small diced veggies. The only difference between it and the American equivalent is that corn dishes tend to be a bit sweet here.

After that came a hot and sour soup. Northern Chinese food in general tends towards hot and sour rather than sweet flavors. It was very pleasant, not overly strong in any way, with a lot of tofu strips and some veggies. I had a lot of this, since I'm recovering from a cold.

Then came (I think) a pork and green onion dish. It was basically stir-friend shredded pork and green onions, with tofu skins to wrap it with. Tofu skin, you ask? Its a thin sheet of very firm tofu. I've seen it used this way and also cut into strips and used like noodles with some veggies to make a very pleasant, light dish.

Last (I think) came a fried pork dish. Thin strips of pork, fried very nicely, not greasy, with a spice powder on the plate to dip it in. I've seen several variations on this dish, with shrimp, green beans and bacon.

I'd be remiss not to mention that my student and his friends were very good hosts. They were very polite, constantly refilling my soup, beer, or tea, or trying to make sure I was comfortable. It took two buses to get back from their campus, and two of them even went with me on the first to make sure I'd find the second. Maybe we'll do something like this again.

2005-10-24T20:53:00.000+08:00

so, i'm attempting another post on our notoriously untrustworthy computer, hopefully it won't crash. i have not done a whole lot today, mainly because i am feeling slightly under the weather. having some sort of low-grade sickness is kind of a general state in china, between the somewhat unhygenic food, the small children, and the some what dirty atmosphere, although i had gone through about a month with no cold or digestion issues. this one was pretty inevitable, seeing as dan and our other roommates had all been sick a few days earlier.
today, i lay on the couch and watched a korean soap opera. i have become addicted to korean soap operas through one of my roommates. they are really popular in qingdao--all the dvd stores sell dozens of korean soaps and hundreds of korean movies. they are much better than american soap operas, and a lot shorter--they are only about 12-20 episodes long. the one we are watching now is called "full house," it's about a woman who enters into a contract marriage with a pop star in order to get back her house, yet he is in love with another woman and she is attracted to another man, but they are also both falling in love with eachother. in some ways, korean tv is very similar to american tv, but in other ways, its really different. for example, in one scene, she threatens to divorce him, and he tells her to think about his parents and how much it would hurt them, and what a loss of face it would be to them. she stops and says, yes, i hate you, but i can't do that to his parents. i don't think appeals to filial piety would really keep an arguing american couple together on a soap. also, it's much less steamy--all sorts of love triangles and scandals, and not so much even a peck on the cheek.

other than that, i have also been helping one of my chinese friends study for her postgraduate translation/linguistics exam. she is graduating from qingdao university this spring and wants to study in shanghai, one of the top schools for english linguistics and translation. the test is incredibly difficult--much harder than any standardized test i've seen in america. on one section, she had to read sentences and fill in a missing word from a word bank. the sentences however, were from passages of from authors such as edward said, joseph campbell, and foucault, as well as long grammatically awkward sentences filled with enormous words about saussere, gramsci, the new testement, and marx. the words were things like diachronic, which i had to look up in my english-chinese dictionary, antithesis, realm, structure, structuralist, etc.
there were reading passages with questions that were incredibly convoluted, two about poe, baudelaire and the issues of identity and plagiarism. one of the more straightforward readings was w.e.b. dubois' "double consciousness essay."
there was also a section where she had to identify an error in a sentence (out of a choice four things wrong) and then correct it. one sentence was really hard, i couldn't tell what exactly was wrong and how to correct it, maybe one of you will know:

In the United States, for example, reading may be less essential than it ever was--at least where books are concerned.

the possible options are in bold, which one of those four do you think are wrong, and why?

comment update!

2005-10-22T23:13:00.000+08:00

so, i wrote a long blog entry earlier, and then our computer crashed so i lost it, and i haven't felt motivated to write one any time soon, but this is just a quick note. for some unknown reason, we can now read our blog AND all the comments, so feel free to comment away. i've noticed most of our comments are advertisements, which is depressing, so i'm counting on you good people to outdo corporate america.

The expat "community"

2005-10-22T17:31:00.000+08:00

Last night we went to a house-warming party of a guy we know. He's a good friend of a boyfriend of one of the teachers, and we've hung out a few times. Expats here come in a few varieties. There are teachers like us, young people here to "learn Chinese" (read: drink beer and hang out in China), and business-people. Our host works for an export company, so he has a plush apartment and more money than he knows what to do with. That means abundant cheese (cheese!) from New Zealand (He's from New Zealand).

The party was pretty nice, enough people we had met before to make me feel comfortable. A mix of different nationalities. Heavy on the Americans and Australians, with some English French German Turk, and a few Chinese. I've probably learned more about comparative English here than about Chinese, and more local English slang than Chinese vocab. By the way, Chinese people always assume Britta is Russian. She can tell because they see her and yell "Russia" in Chinese. This is not a compliment, exactly, considering the most prominent occupation of Russian women in China.

2005-10-16T14:18:00.000+08:00

It's funny, in China being a foreigner means one gets "special treatment," which can be a good or a bad thing. Sometimes it means the price is 3x higher, yet sometimes it means that people give you random gifts or deals. Today, I went to buy some small "sour oranges" which are basically like green-skinned tangerines. I just wanted one or two for a snack, so I picked up two and put them in a bag and asked the man how much they were. He looked at the bag and laughed. He said, "you only want two? okay, it's free." I told him that I was embarrassed (a stock phrase in Chinese which means, among other things, that you can't accept a gift because it's too much). He waved me away and said nonsense. I looked in my wallet for change, but I didn't have anything, all I had was an American nickel, so I gave it to him as a gift. He laughed, and then began to put more tangerines and other fruit into my bag. I asked how much should I pay, and he laughed, saying that between friends, no money was needed. I promised him I would buy more fruit some other time, and went off with my free bag full of fruit.

Speaking of

2005-10-16T13:53:00.000+08:00

Speaking of parties, we live right next to the biggest party school in Qingdao--that's right, it is known as the Party School of Qingdao city. Despite the austere appearance and sleek black cars we see constantly entering the main gate, Dan and I think we might stop on a friday night to see if they have any nice keggers going on.

Speaking of other things, I often talk about how cheap everything in China is, and to a great extent, that is true. China in most respects has a much lower cost of living. Yet at the same time, China isn't THAT cheap, and it gets more expensive all the time. For example, although I buy cheap clothes, they are respectively not that much cheaper than the clothes I buy in America. I shop in the bargain bins and second hand clothing stores in America; I shop in the bargain bins (or as Dan pointed out, I bargain furiously) in China too. (They don't have any second hand clothing stores in China, no one really wants to wear clothes of possibly dead people, and probably not clothes that some person would want to throw away. Also, people seem to wear the clothes they have pretty well, I couldn't even imagine how worn out any second hand clothing would be). In some ways, buying a 6 dollar sweater in China isn't all that different from buying a 6 dollar sweater in America: people are pretty amazed that you could get a sweater that cheap. The main difference of course is that a six dollar sweater in China will be new and from a slightly nicer place than a 6 dollar sweater in America. In fact, there are plenty of opportunities to spend loads of money on things, especially in the ritzy area around our school. There is a Prada and a Louis Vuitton store; there is an expensive Japanese mall with western shops like Esprit; there is an even more expensive mall a couple of blocks away selling more designer wares; and there are many Korean boutiques and consigment shops catering to the large Korean expat community in our area (I heard that Koreans spend something like 22% of their household income on clothes. I don't know if that percentage is correct, but from what I've heard and seen on TV and real life, I can say it's probably very high). Of course, most Chinese people could not afford to shop in any of these stores. The average income in Qingdao is about 1000-1500 yuan a month ($175-$200). Even doctors make only around 3000 yuan a month. In fact, Dan and I earn about the same amount as a senior government bureaucrat would. That said though, there are also many Chinese businessmen who make high western salaries, and basically have money to burn, not to mention all the western expats earning western salaries and the scores of wealthy Koreans. For example, Dan and I frequently go to a Japanese-Korean restaurant near the school. It is quite expensive, except for the basic sushi which is a pretty good deal. Dan and I mainly just order the sushi, but often when we go there, we see people with platters of sushi, sashimi, teriaki, fish, beef, etc. One time, we saw a table of middle aged Korean men and women who were sitting around talking. They had probably about 8000 yuan ($1,000) of food in front of them: huge ice blocks of raw fish; sushi; basically everything on the menu, and none of them were touching any of the food. They just sat there talking and smoking and sipping cocktails. After about half and hour, one woman picked up a small piece of tuna with her chopstick, looked at it, and then put it on her plate. After about another half an hour, they left leaving the table heaping with food. Dan and our roommate and I wanted to run over and eat some, but instead we hoped the servers were able to get a good meal out of it.
That level of conspicuous consumption is somewhat extreme, but we do see similar things as well in bars and other posh places that cater to foreigners. It seems to me that China is an interesting country in that the gap between the upper middle class (people like me and Dan and doctors and lawyers etc.) and the truly wealthy business man is quite large. Of course, the gap between the middle class and the poor is also incredibly big. (And probably of more social concern).

The Party

2005-10-15T11:00:00.000+08:00

Yesterday we had Chinese class early, because our teacher had another engagement. She is a member of the Communist Party, and there was an obligatory meeting that she had to attend. I was fascinated to learn that she was a member, since I was raised to thing of it as a sinister, mysterious organization. And here my young, smiling English teacher was a member. I had already learned a few things about the party from living here. Most citizens are not members, membership is a necessary condition for higher-level government positions, and it prevents you from being allowed to have a religion. (Nowadays Chinese people in general are allowed to, but it is a relatively recent privilege.)

From asking my teacher I learned a couple more things. You can only enter once you turn 18, but membership is not open to everyone. You need to have a certain level of academic achievement, and preferably some experience with community service. Most people would not make the cut, and it is considered very impressive to be admitted at 18. So it seems like the party serves two functions. First, it governs the country. But second, membership serves as a national honors society, which encourages ambitious young people to join. As Britta joked when we were discussing this the other day, they don't want ordinary proletarians for members. It's a party of elites.

2005-10-13T22:29:00.000+08:00

so, again, it's been awhile since i have written, partially due to our computer troubles at home (mother, we do have broadband though, and they have free wireless access in most of the coffee shops), the trouble isn't so much our internet connection so much as the unreliable virus-ridden computer that we're using. teaching is going quite well, i have about 15 students in my adult class, and they're starting to warm up and get less shy about teaching english. i have one student who is especially friendly. she gives me a ride home after class every night in her leather interior peugeot. she gave me a ride home tonight, even though yesterday she had laser eye surgery. i asked her if it was okay to drive, and she shrugged off any concern. in class, she wore dark glasses and let me know that she wasn't really allowed to read, but she didn't think our textbook would be a problem. i guess laser eye surgery has progressed a lot in the last decade. anyways, this woman works for a bank near our school, and in several months will go on a business trip to germany, france, and england, where she must speak in english, so she decided to take my class. she keeps asking me what my favorite food is, so i hope that she will take me out or cook a chinese meal for me.

also today, i made my second attempt to join the library. even though china is an authoritarian country, the maddening arbitary bureaucracy rarely comes through in everyday life (well, at least my everyday life), but i guess i get my dose of it with the library. to join, one needs to bring to 1" photos, a photo idea, about 200 yuan ($24, most of which is a deposit which is returned to you when you turn in your card), and fill out two separate forms. the first time i forgot to bring photos, so i was rejected. (they did let me read magazines in the periodical room, though.) this time i came prepared, or so i thought. i had my photos and my international student id card, which has a photo of me. unfortunately, my card was not good enough, only my passport would work. after looking at my card number (they didn't even bother to look at the card) they merely said "bu xing" or "not acceptable," and no amount of pleading would get them to change their minds. again, they let me read in the periodical room, and i'll have to try again next time.

Some more on the trip

2005-10-11T18:52:00.000+08:00

Please don't judge us harshly for not posting more often. Our computer at home that has internet is worthless, and the only one that works at school is often taken.

We spent two days on our trip at the city with the lake, and then another two at the one with canals and gardens. Then we had one day at this city called Zhouzuang, which is another canal city (but smaller and more canal-filled) that has a lot of older architecture. We took a little bus over, which was entertaining (in retrospect) for having fold down seats that filled up the center isle.

When we got off the bus two young Chinese women suggested that we team up and get cheaper taxi fare and rooms. We went along with it, and by the time that we had settled into our hotel rooms it was already getting a bit late. So after we had seen a few sites (well preserved homes of rich people) there was nothing to do but go shopping.

This town at some point in the last twenty years went from sleepy village to air-tight tourist trap. You pay a flat fee of 100 RMB ($12) to get inside the historical district, and then every inch of space that isn't a registered attraction or restaurant is filled with shop stalls selling traditional handicrafts and trinkets. Everything from tiny glass vials that are painted inside to jewelry to handmade wooden barrels and garden tools. And almost all of the food stalls and restaurants are called Grandma's this or that, and sell fairly uniform products. Mostly regional candy, barbequed meat on the bone that we think was pig hoof, and tofu on a stick that smelled and tasted unpleasantly like fish.

One more thing. Have any of you ever seen Britta bargain? To get beyond a certain level you need a tunnel-vision focus on getting the lowest possible price, and Britta has it. I only made out a few words ("too expensive", "cheaper", and the numbers), but by the end the shopkeepers were visibly taken off guard (and amused) to find a foreigner who could actually bargain. The rule is that no foreigner can ever get the Chinese price, period, but Britta got really close.

first an little story

2005-10-05T13:50:00.000+08:00

Britta and just got back this morning. There may be a couple informative entries that we can milk out of the trip, but first i'll tell a funny story.

We were walking around Suzhou, it was late afternoon so the attractions were closed and we were tired from walking all day. Britta suggested i get a haircut, which i badly needed.(A downside to communicating over the internet is that you are unable to see changes in our appearance, like the beard i'm sporting that's now a week old and pretty hideous.)

We went in, and Britta started chatting with the friendly people in the store. Later on, about 10 minutes into my 20 minute complimentary scalp massage (one of the better things about China, and the whole thing was only 20 yuan or $2.50), the scalp masseuse asked Britta why her hair is blonde and mine is black. (This question comes up pretty often, actually, since many Chinese people think that most Americans are blonde, and my hair makes me look Chinese.) Britta explained that we are different ethnicities, and I'm Jewish. The woman was shocked, and exclaimed in surprise that I must be very smart. I think she was basing this on Karl Marx and Albert Einstein, the greatest minds of the 20th century. Later on she jokingly asked Britta why if I was so smart I couldn't speak Chinese better.

A few days later we were in a foreign language bookstore hoping that it would have an updated guidebook. Britta stumbled upon a three book series explaining the money-making secrets of the Jews, written in Chinese of course. And next to it was another book, called i think "the secrets of the Jewish" which promised to explain the secrets of Jewish achievements, including but not limited to money-making. Britta bought that one, so she can write about it here as she reads.

2005-09-30T22:07:00.000+08:00

So, I am writing to you from Suzhou, Portland's sister city, famed for it's gardens and its canals. We got here this afternoon, and so far we have seen several canals (it's not exactly "the Venice of China" but the canals are very pleasant) but no gardens yet. We had originally planned on going to Kunming, but the plane tickets turned out to be 3440 yuan, which was way to expensive. We decided instead to go to Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Shanghai. We spent the last two nights in Hangzhou, which is known as China's tourist capital of the world. The bus station seemed to prove that, because as soon as we got of the bus, we were hassled with dozens of people trying to get us to go to their hotels or on their tours or to buy their maps. Finally we managed to make it on to a bus and get into the middle of town. We ended up near the Hangzhou tourist information center, where a very pushy man told us that he could get us a room in a 3 star hotel nearby for 150 yuan. Ｗｅ　ｃｏｎｆｉｒｍｅｄ　ｔｈａｔ　ｔｈｅｒｅ　ｗａｓ　ｎｏｔｈｉｎｇ　ｒｅｍｏｔｅｌｙ　ａｓ　ｃｈｅａｐ　ａｓ　ｔｈａｔ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ａｒｅａ　ａｔ　ｔｈｅ　ｔｏｕｒｉｓｔ　ａｒｅａ，　ｓｏ　ｗｅ　ｆｏｌｌｏｗｅｄ　ｔｈｅ　ｍａｎ　ｔｏ　ａ　ｒｏｏｍ　ｔｈａｔ　ｗａｓ　ｎｅｉｔｈｅｒ　ｉｎ　ａ　ｔｈｒｅｅ　ｓｔａｒ　ｈｏｔｅｌ　ｎｏｒ　１５０　ｙｕａｎ．　　Ａｔ　ｆｉｒｓｔ　ｈｅ　ｔｒｉｅｄ　ｔｏ　ｇｅｔ　ｕｓ　ｔｏ　ｐａｙ　２２０　ｙｕａｎ，　ｂｕｔ　ｆｉｎａｌｌｙ　ｗｅ　ｗｅｒｅ　ａｂｌｅ　ｔｏ　ｇｅｔ　ｔｈｅ　ｒｏｏｍ　ｆｏｒ　１６０　ｙｕａｎ　ａｆｔｅｒ　ｂａｒｇａｉｎｉｎｇ　ｗｉｔｈ　ｔｈｅ　ｆｒｏｎｔ　ｄｅｓｋ　ｗｏｍａｎ．　　Ｗｅ　ｗｅｒｅ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｃｅｎｔｅｒ　ｏｆ　ｔｏｗｎ　ｎｅａｒ　ｔｈｅ　Ｗｅｓｔ　Ｌａｋｅ，　ｔｈｉｓ　ｅｎｏｒｍｏｕｓ　ａｎｄ　ｂｅａｕｔｉｆｕｌ　ｌａｋｅ　ｗｉｔｈ　ｍａｎｙ　ｆａｍｏｕｓ　ｐａｖｉｌｉｏｎｓ　ａｎｄ　ｇａｒｄｅｎｓ　ｏｎ　ｉｓｌａｎｄｓ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｍｉｄｄｌｅ．　　Ｗｅ　ｅｎｄｅｄ　ｕｐ　ｏｎ　ａ　ｂｏａｔ　ｒｉｄｅ　ｗｉｔｈ　ａ　Ｃｈｉｎｅｓｅ　ｍａｎ　ａｎｄ　ｈｉｓ　ｌｉｔｔｌｅ　ｓｉｓｔｅｒ　（ｂｏｔｈ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅｉｒ　ｔｈｉｒｔｉｅｓ）　ａｎｄ　ｌｉｓｔｅｎｅｄ　ｔｏ　ｔｈｅ　ｂｏａｔ　ｒｉｄｅｒ　ｒｅｃｉｔｅ　ｐｏｅｔｒｙ　ａｎｄ　ｍａｋｅ　ｌｉｔｅｒａｒｙ　ｒｅｆｅｒｅｎｃｅｓ　ｔｈａｔ　ｗｅｎｔ　ｗａｙ　ｏｖｅｒ　ｏｕｒ　ｈｅａｄ．　　After the boat ride, ｉｔ　ｗａｓ　ｃｏｍｐｌｅｔｅｌｙ　ｄａｒｋ　ａｎｄ　ｔｈｅ　ｓｉｂｌｉｎｇｓ　ａｓｋｅｄ　ｉｆ　ｗｅ　ｗａｎｔｅｄ　ｔｏ　ｓｈａｒｅ　ａ　ｃａｂ.　　Ｗｅ　ｅｎｄｅｄ　ｕｐ　ｒｉｄｉｎｇ　ａｒｏｕｎｄ　ｔｈｅ　ｍｉｄｄｌｅ　ｆｏ　ｎｏｗｈｅｒｅ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｄａｒｋ　ｐａｓｔ　ｔｅａ　ｆｉｅｌｄｓ　ｏｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｏｕｔｓｋｉｒｔｓ　ｏｆ　Ｈａｎｇｚｈｏｕ． Hangzhou is famous for a tea that is somehow related to the Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong and a well. 　Ｗｅ　ｇｏｔ　ｔｏ　ｓｅｅ　ｔｈｅ　ｗｅｌｌ　ａｎｄ　ｔａｓｔｅ　ｔｈｅ　ｔｅａ，　ａｎｄ　ｔｈｅｎ　ｗｅ　ｗｅｎｔ　ｂａｃｋ　ｔｏ　ｔｈｅ　ｈｅａｒｔ　ｏｆ　ｔｈｅ　ｃｉｔｙ　ａｎｄ　ｗａｌｋｅｄ　ａｒｏｕｎｄ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｓｈｏｐｐｉｎ　ｇ　ｄｉｓｔｒｉｃｔ．　

2005-09-26T13:49:00.000+08:00

I went to the bookstore yesterday to buy some books. I bought a book we had read exerpts of in my Chinese class at Swarthmore, a folk tale book, but my main purpose was to buy a a Ha-li Bwo-te book (known in some backwaters as "Harry Potter"). They had books 1-5 in Chinese (for those who don't know, there are currently 6 books in the series). The books have in general been increasing in length, with the first book around 300 pages and the 5th book over 800 pages. Chinese books are in general much more compact, but of course the 5th book was still almost three times as thick as the first one. The reason to mention this at all is because in China, you apparently pay for books by weight. The first book was around 20 kuai ($2.50), where as the last book was almost 60 kuai ($7.50), and each book in the middle increased its price in proportion to the increased length. Sure enough, I noticed my smallest book was the cheapest, and my largest thickest book was the most expensive.
I had noticed this phenomenon in another book store, when I went to buy a book that had been sitting under a sign that said 10 yuan. I had assumed that meant 10 kuai per book (yuan and kuai are both words for the RMB, the Chinese currency). Much to my surprise, when I brought the book up to the counter, the woman put it on a scale. It turns out that it was 10 kuai per 1/2 kilogram. The book, worked out to actually be 11.33 (spoiling my hopes that I had perfect change). I suppose the logic is that if the book is longer, there's more reading material in it, and hence it should be worth more money.

trivia

2005-09-22T19:06:00.000+08:00

Did you know that in China people draw stars more or less the same way that we do in the States, except they start in the upper-left hand corner? Or that left-handed people are very rare here, and are considered to be very intelligent? Or that Chinese people have equivalents to our eanie-meanie minie moe system, except with different words, and in Chinese? Or that they have their own tongue-twisters, also in Chinese? Or that they learn the alphabet song in English class as children, but the song is slightly different? (It still has the same letters. It just slows down around the elemenowpea part, so that you can actually understand all the letters, and the text at the end is different and longer. It's probably better as a teaching aid than ours, but doesn't sound as nice.) Or that Chinese people write letters a little differently? A few more flourishes, for example lowercase "t"s and "i"s will always curve at the bottom. When the topic comes up they are sometimes a bit snotty about it, since they think their way looks better than ours. Chinese restaurants usually use wooden or plastic chopsticks, and Korean restaurants usually use metal ones. The Japanese restaurants are Korean-owned, so they use metal chopsticks too.

Tell your friends.

tidbits

2005-09-21T16:49:00.000+08:00

First, I was at the bus stop several days ago when I saw a man with a T-shirt that said "Oregon" on the back. I got really excited, until he turned around and I saw it said "Nike sports" on the front, but still, Oregon is Oregon, and I'm glad that at least some publicity for our state out here. Though speaking of the great NW, Portland is on the map for all college-age males it seems. Here is a typical conversation: college-age-male: "Where are you from?" me: "America." him: "Where in America?" me: "Bo-te-lan" him: "what?" me: "BO-TE-LAN" him: "Ah! bo-te-lan! I know--trail blazers!! very good. you know?" me: "yes, I know" him: "si-ka-ti pi-pi-ne" me: "oh yes" him: "ai-lan i-bar-sen. you know?" me: "yes, I know. he is in philadelphia." him: "where?" me: "fei-cheng" him: "oh, yes, very good."

Other than that, life has been low-key. I have a new class every Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I teach Up Close 1, the same course I taught in the summer, but this time I teach adults. Most of the people there are business men and women looking to improve their English and probably advance their careers, though I do have a few college students and a DJ. I like the class a lot. It's a bit more formal than teaching 11 year olds, but I don't have even close to half the number of discipline problems. I did have trouble trying to get a bunch of adults to work in small groups or in partners. I know I am the teacher, but I am at least 10 years younger than everyone else in the room, and it is a little awkward to have to assign adults into groups.

We also have a week-long vacation coming up, during which we are planning on traveling. The one problem is, this is also a vacation for pretty much everyone else in China, so traveling is difficult and expensive. Right now our top choices are Hainan, a large island off the coast of Southern China known for its white beaches. (THere are beaches in Qingdao, of course, but as someone pointed out, if Hainan is the Tahiti of China, then Qingdao is the Atlantic city). But as tickets there are expensive and it still might be typhoon season, we are also thinking of going to Kunming, which we have heard is amazing. If anyone has any suggestions, we'd be interested in hearing them.

Shopping in Tai Dong

2005-09-11T18:16:00.000+08:00

Whenever people talk about shopping here, a few places come up. There is JUSCO, just over five minutes from our school, which is a Japanese luxury mall with a luxury supermarket. It's a pretty good place to get lunch if you don't mind getting overcharged. Then there is Carrefour, a French budget version of JUSCO. One bus stop away from school, and it's impossible to drag Britta away from their discount bins.

But if you really want a good deal, you need to go to Tai Dong. Nobody disputes this. So when I was asking people where I should get a cell phone (everyone has one here), they told me I had to go to Tai Dong, and one of my TA's offered to come along. It was very kind of her - I think she couldn't stand the idea of how badly I would get ripped off if there wasn't a Chinese person there to help.

Britta came along too, looking to get a mini mp3 player. We went to a series of different electronics stores, going to different counters selling different brands. The trick seemed to be figuring out what you want, and comparing prices at as many stores as possible. It's hard to tell how things would have gone differently without my TA there to help, but there wasn't any negotiation involved. We would go to a counter and they would suggest products and tell us their prices. She mentioned that there was another store where it's possible to get better prices if you negotiate well, but the products there aren't trustworthy.

In the end both us us are happy with our new toys. My phone is cheap, decent looking, and easy to use, and Britta's player is very cute with decent storage capacity. I wonder what will happen the next time we go. Some of my clothes aren't fitting well, but I'm a bit dubious about Chinese mens' fashions. On the bright side, I've heard that Tai Dong has good cheap food.

after a week of lessons

2005-09-09T16:32:00.000+08:00

Last time I had quite a pessimistic tone. Now I'm not so discouraged. The first teacher has continued to be good, and the second teacher continued to be quite bad. The difference is that the administration now realizes the problem, and seems ready to change things if need be. I'm pretty confident that it will be, and I hope that others agree.

As for the classes themselves, we've been focusing almost entirely on pronunciation and characters. I'm happy that we're spending so much time working on the pronunciation, because there's no use learning words that you can't say properly. Characters are fine too, but I wish they weren't so much of an emphasis. It requires so much time to learn them, especially at first, and they aren't as important to me as conversational Chinese.

I had a bit of a panic this morning, realizing that I didn't have enough time to learn the last set of characters properly, and if we kept going at this rate in the future I wouldn't have time to learn characters and do anything else. I'm trying to apply to grad school, so I wouldn't want to spend all my time studying an aspect of Chinese that is of secondary importance and neglect my applications.

Today I was relieved to learn that we're going to slow down next week, and we'll be doing two lessons a week rather than five from now on. Which I should have know all along, but had misunderstood.

Enough of this. Next time I'll write about something outside of the classroom.

P.S. I thought I had posted this yesterday, but I was on a computer with a chinese web browser, and I accidently saved a draft instead.

Starting my lessons

2005-09-06T14:15:00.000+08:00

Today we had our second lesson. We, by the way, means me and four other Leewen English teachers. I don't know what I think about putting complaints about the school on this blog, but so far my experience has been a bit mixed. One problem is that we're paying way too much for the lessons - about 750 yuan a month. That probably doesn't sound like very much, but we could pay about half that much at a different school.

We have two different teachers, one Monday Wednesday Friday, and the other Tuesday Thursday. I'm pretty sure that we had been told that the teachers would be university professors, but they're actually university students. Perhaps we had all misunderstood, but it seems a bit stingy of them to take so much money from us and then give us amateur teachers.

Initial gripes aside, the first day was pretty good. We started at the beginning with pronunciation, and she made sure that we were getting us right. She had taught some of the classes last Spring, and apparently she was a popular teacher. The other teacher is a whole other story. I'm pretty sure she doesn't have any experience teaching beginning Chinese, because she went way too fast, and didn't adequately check that we were getting it. The other problem was that she didn't understand any of our questions. A few times I had to explain someone elses question to her.

Our supervisor asked for feedback after class, and I'm sure we all said the same thing, so hopefully she'll improve. Tomorrow is the better teacher, though, so I look forward to that.

Qufu pt 1

2005-09-03T18:49:00.000+08:00

Yesterday morning very early Dan and I got back from Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. All in all it was a good trip, although not the most relaxing one possible. Qufu is in Shandong province, the same province as Qingdao, but it is a good 12 hours by train and bus to the city. There are no trains that go to Qufu, the best way to get there is to take a train to a nearby city and then take the bus. We decided to take a train to Jinan, the capital of Shandong. It's a 7.5 hour train ride from Qingdao and a 3 hour bus ride from Qufu. Originally, we heard that it took 3 hours to get to Jinan, so we assumed that it would be about a 5 hour trip total to get to Qufu. We bought train tickets leaving Qingdao in the afternoon to a random city near Qufu and assumed we would get in late in the evening. Much to our suprise, we looked at the time schedule and realized we wouldn't get in until 2:30 in the morning, about a 9-10 ride. Moreover, the tickets we had bought were hard seat, which meant that basically we would have to be sitting on a plastic bench for all of those 9 hours. We managed to go back and change tickets, instead we got a sleeper train to Jinan that left Qingdao at about 9 and got in to Jinan at 5:30 the next morning. (We found out later that they have just introduced the three hour train to that city, it does run several times a day, but none were convenient for us and of course all of the tickets were completely sold out.) We traveled hard bed, which is fine, although the train was not quite as clean or new as the trains I had been on from Beijing, and we were at the very top of three bunks, were it was at least 100 degrees. Moreover, two people were snoring so loudly it was impossible to sleep. We would hear random thumps, presumably from fed-up people whacking them, and then there would be silence for about 5 minutes, but then the snoring began again.
There are three bus stations in Jinan, one conveniently located right next to the train station. OUr somewhat outdated guide book said that no buses there went to Qufu, but we decided to check it out. Sure enough, none of the buses had signs to Qufu. Just to make sure, I went to the ticket office and asked the woman if they didn't have buses to Qufu. She answered "keyi" which basically means, "could." She told us to buy a ticket to some other random town and ask bus driver to drop us off at Qufu. We got on the bus, which was completely filled with people who looked like peasants returning to the fields. THey kind of looked at us incredulously, because I guess no tourist in their right mind would want to visit the town the bus was heading for. Finally one passenger asked if we were teachers, and I said yes, and he nodded knowingly. The bus was actually quite nice, and cleaner than the train, although the bus driver drove like a complete maniac. At one point, we were driving the wrong way on the highway, and the bus driver wanted to cut across a divide to get into the right lane, but there was a construction barrier up. There was a 15 minute showdown with the construction workers which involved us parked facing the wrong direction in a lane while the bus driver and several passengers got out to argue with the construction workers. It didn't work, and eventually the driver drove in reverse for about 100 feet on the highway and then did a U-turn across 4 lanes of traffic, none of which seemed to slow down. Amazingly, Dan mananged to sleep through the entire thing. When we got to the outskirts of Qufu, the bus driver stopped and yelled Qufu, so we got off the bus. Despite the fact we were standing right off the highway, there was still at taxi, who ever so helpfully took us into town and right to a hotel, basically telling us it was the only hotel in Qingdao (I wonder how much his commission was). The hotel was called the Confucius Mansion Hotel (well, actually the "Confucius Massion Hotel") and was a hotel attempting to be much fancier than it had the facilities for. We ended up with quite a nice room though, after bargaining it down from 388 kuai to 170 kuai (45 dollars to about 20 dollars). It came with complimentary toiletries, cable, air conditioning, two beds and was quite clean, so it seemed like a fairly good deal. It was also directly across the street from the Confucious temple and mansion, so it was a very convenient location.
Qufu is a small city of about 200,000 people, and over a fifth of the downtown area is taken up by the confucius temple and the family complex. Both are enormous, having been greatly expanded in the Ming and Qing empires. Confucius died about 2500 years ago with somewhat modest means, so it's not surprising nothing is left from his actual life. Starting in the Song dynasty, emperors began to build up Confucius' house and shrine, and during the Qing dynasty, one of his distant descendents (of the 76th generation), some sort of lord, expanded his home to its present size of more than 480 rooms with courtyards and gardens. The temple is also quite grand, although not as big. About a mile walk away from the mansion and on the outskirts of Qufu is the Confucius forest. It is where he is buried along with 100,000 of his descendents. It's quite a large forest and refreshingly ungroomed. We walked along a stone path that makes a loop around the forest and looked at ancient gravestones poking out among the trees and high underbrush. Every once and awhile there would be a shrine to one of his more famous descendents or a bunch of statues. Near the front entrance is the shrine to Confucius, his son, and grandson. It was actually a very pleasant and quiet place, although the mosquitoes were in full force, and I suppose the lack of other tourists meant they focused all their attention on Dan and me.
I'll write more about Qufu later, but I have to run now, so consider this the first in a two part installment (Dan can add the revised version later).

Lao Shan

2005-08-30T17:28:00.000+08:00

Just a few minutes to write a quick update, we are going to spend the next couple of days in Qufu, Confucius' birthplace during our week off. We were planning on leaving earlier today, but since we only went to the ticket office early this afternoon, and getting around Shandong province takes much more time than we thought, we've decided to go at night and take an overnight train. We'll get into Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, at 5 tomorrow, and then take a bus to Qufu. Hopefully it should be a neat trip.
Yesterday we went with the other teachers and the school to Lao Shan, or Lao mountain, which is a mountain about an hour outside of Qingdao that is a famous Taoist holy mountain. We left at 7am and didn't get back until 7 pm, so it was a full day of hiking. We hiked up two peaks, a southern peak in the morning and a northern peak in the afternoon (it was hard to tell if they were THE peaks or two of several). The mountain was beautiful, and the day was cool and misty, which ruined the view but made hiking pleasant. It wasn't exactly the pristine wilderness that we expect from hiking in nature, given that there were tons of little stalls of people selling tea, dried fish, and nick-nacks, but there were long stretches where it was just the mountain scenery and us, with almost no other hikers. Indeed, we were the only ones at the northern peak summit, the taller and more isolated rugged one. One other difference was that much of the path was steps, either stone or concrete, which was actually more difficult; it's much harder to walk up steps to the top of a mountain than to climb a steep path. All things considered, it's definitely something I would want to do again. Along one of the paths descending from the mountain we came across a monkey cage, although the monkeys seemed to have found a way out. One monkey in particular was quite aggressive and stole one of the teacher's gatorade bottle. He was unable to open it though, before another monkey nursing her infant stole it from him. Eventually the teacher took off the lid and put it at the top of the cage and the alpha male dumped it on top of himself, but managed to get a sip in.
We also had a very nice lunch in a restaurant that consisted of lots of little private buildings. The lunch included, among other things, some fried insects that we dipped in salt and pepper. They didn't have a lot of flavor though, they were mainly just crunchy.

our life

2005-08-28T15:08:00.000+08:00

So it's been awhile since we have last written, partially because this last week of summer classes has been busy with grading tests and writing final evaluations. Now however, summer classes are completely over, and we get a nice break until fall classes start in september. The fall classes will be much more relaxed, we won't be teaching more than 15-20 hours a week, or so we've been told. Also, this past week my rommate and her friend visited us after teaching in Seoul for the summer, which was very fun but also kept us busy. We did some actual sight seeing of Qingdao, which was long overdue after living in the city for two months. We saw both the protestant and catholic churches, (otherwise known as the catholic and 'christian' churches). Both were actually quite charming, although I must say that the interior of the catholic church definitely beat out the protestant church in terms of interesting interior. Yet at the protestant church, we were able to climb the bell tower for 4 kuai. It was a bit of a let down to anyone who has ever been in a bell tower in a European church, but we did get a pretty good view of Qingdao, which is actually quite a gorgeous city. Both churches are in the German area, which is full of old Bavarian style buildings and newer imitation Bavarian style buildings. It's also nearby the old governor's mansion which looks like a European palace. It's now a governmental building and we weren't allowed to go in, but we peered in the door (or at least I did) and caught a glimpse of the some of the old wood work. I wouldn't say exactly that Qingdao is exactly like a European city, but it does have a very European feeling, although instead of being able to get gelato on every street corner, we can get squid on a stick. Qingdao has lots of trees and fairly wide stone sidewalks which makes it nice for strolling around.
THe beer festival has also been going on, although with our schedule, we have not found time to go. Tonight is the last night, so Dan and I will go when I finish work at 7:30. I don't work until 5:30 today, so I made an attempt to go earlier with a Chinese English teacher (about half the teachers at the school are Chinese), and we went to the smaller beer festival site, but no one was really there and she had not a lot of interest in staying, so we walked to the beach and then went to a Korean restaurant.

Last Days redux + karaoke

2005-08-20T16:13:00.000+08:00

As you may have gathered from Britta's post, I just finished two classes. The first is my class of pre-college students. Of 11 only 6 managed to show for either of the last two days and take the test. It did make for an intimate atmosphere during our last class. It didn't take very long to review the test, and we spent the rest of the time sitting around and chatting while filling ourselve with sugary foods and drinks. I had been disapointed before by their unwillingness to relax and have a conversation, but that wasn't a problem on Friday. Maybe I should have been sitting in a desk with them before, or perhaps I was just too stiff. Regardless, I hope to see some of them again. I just got an email from one of the 5 that I haven't seen recently, asking for some help with her English, and I figure that means having some conversation.

My experience of teaching my other class had been dominated by my frequently failed attempts to secure basically decent behavior from a few difficult boys. By the end I rarely had more than two at once, so it wasn't as bad. The last day seemed more relaxed. Even though the kids were hopped up on sweets, and Peter spent most of the time in a very uneven wrestling match with either Michael or Blake (he's about twice their size), there wasn't anything to really rebel against. The kids would come up to me to make conversation, asking about how I like China, what I want to do in the future, etc, and it felt pretty good. BTW, I've got a bunch of photos, and they'll be on the net somewhere in the next couple weeks.

Last night we went out to a karaoke club with a few of the TAs. We had our own room, so it was just the 9 of us on a large leather couch, a computer to select songs, a large tv for the music videos, and two mics. When the Chinese girls did their own songs, they were always the Chinese hits of the moment that we hear blasting out of all the stores, and they sang them well. We (in as much as I participated) always did older stuff, very poorly. There may be a cultural lesson to be learned or something.

last day

2005-08-19T17:43:00.000+08:00

today was the last day of class for one of my classes and two of Dan's classes. Truth be told, no matter how tired and grumpy I've been or no matter how unruly they've been (and they've been pretty awful for the past week), it's still a little bittersweet. I've spent 2 hours a day for 5 days a week with them for six weeks, and now I probably won't see most of them again (though it's highly possible that they'll take more classes at Lee-wen). Some of the students I'll really miss. One of my favorite students was a boy named Peter (I actually have about 6 students named peter, three in that class) who wore a light blue neckbrace. Many days at break, he would come up to me with elaborate drawings of dinosaurs and ask me to write the English name. He soon gave up after he realized I couldn't tell a diplodicus from a brachiosaurus, and so he researched their English names and then asked me to write the phonetic spelling. Every kid in China seems to know that phonetic dictionary spelling as well as they can write English, and are shocked that we English teachers can't. I did manage to find the phonetic spellings of several on one kid's expensive electronic dictionary, though they didn't have "memenchisaurus" or "sinosauropteryx."
Back to my classes though:
The attrition rate for my class ending today was pretty steep; today in a class that once had 26 kids only about 10 showed up, and I'd probably been averaging about 15 for the past two weeks. This seems to be vacation time for families; many students disappeared for a week or so and then suddenly showed back up with a tan. It did make teaching somewhat difficult, and definitely I think learning was a bit spotty. On the final exam, the class average was about 55%, compared to the midterm the class average was about 78%, only 4 out of 17 students taking the test scored anything remotely respectable, respectable being C or above. I think partially it was the student's attention spans drifting as the end drew near and summer vacation hit its high point, but also the book did become much harder at the end. For example, the kids went from having to make sentences like "this is my book" to "what do you think about the Greenhouse Effect. Write a letter to the editor," to give an example of an exercise completely over their heads. It was depressing to spend over an hour on the basic past tense and have only about 2 kids be able to use past tense at all correctly (It's not like they weren't creative though: 'She movis to Qingdao' and 'she moven't to Beijing' are two examples). Or on a match English-Chinese vocab section, to realize that most students couldn't tell the difference between 'sausage' and 'headache.' But to be fair, many of the better students stopped coming, so I'd like to hope they would have done better.
Other than that, life has continued as usual, the weather has been mercifully cooler and less humid. I'll still have to work until 8:30 most nights, but I'll be free until 3:30 in the afternoons, which is better than having to start at 1:15. Dan only has his 6-8:30 left, so he has pretty much the entire day free.
Other than that, I have found a track near our house, it's one of Qingdao University's smaller tracks, and it's a nice place for jogging. The gates are locked, but the fence around it is easy to squeeze through, and this being China, there are routinely about 30 people playing pick-up soccer in the grassy part, and small children playing on the track. I have gone running twice, though both times the humidity was killer and I am woefully out of shape. Somehow a steep 15 minute climb to our apartment every evening hasn't helped keep me in shape for a 30 minute jog.
Well, I have to go and teach my nightmare of a kindergarten class now, so I have to stop writing. This class is a room full of 5 year olds screaming, along with some four year olds who look suspiciously like 3 or 2 year olds who mainly seem to doodle on their books, desks, clothes, and the chalkboard when I turn my back.

shirts

2005-08-17T17:45:00.000+08:00

so, we haven't been blogging as much, mainly because there have been classes in the computer lab when we are at school and also because our internet is broken and we've been busy, but we'll try to be better about it.
Lots of students have English writing on their shirts, though much of it is unintelligible or perhaps not exactly the type of shirt a 12 year old American kids would wear. I have one student who only wears mickey mouse tee-shirts, he has about 4 different ones. One girl wears a shirt that said "fashion is crescent." The best example of unintelligible writing though, is a boy who wears a shirt that says:
PAOHF
SEFKING THFIR OWM PFRSONALITV...
OMLY GFNUINE THIMGS HAVF DEFN
LEEF AF TIMF PASSFD
BASHF STREFT STYLF
Now that it is the Qingdao beer festival however(which we haven't gone to yet), about half the boys have been wearing Qingdao beer festival shirts.
Well, the lab is filling up with students for an evening class, so we have to go now.

Korean food

2005-08-13T17:13:00.000+08:00

There are a ton of Korean restaurants near our school. There's one a couple blocks away that we've typically gone to. We're a bit predictable, so the waiter gives Britta the menu, opens it and points to the thing she'll order.

It's a large, iron bowl, with rice on the bottom, veggies, meat and sauce in the middle, and lettuce and an egg on top. The egg is approximately sunny-side up by the time the bowl reaches your table, and you can stir it up and let it cook the rest of the way from the heat of bowl and food.

Otherwise we've tried their potato pancakes, which are tasty but incredibly greasy, and I've had a soup that's like a spicy miso, with large cubes of tofu and some veggies, potato slices and clams. I'll definitely order it again.

Saturdays Britta and I have a large, overlapping free period around lunch, so we decided to go out. Chinese restaurant food, even good food, is often pretty greasy, so we tried to find a good looking Japanese place. After a bit of wandering we ended up at a different Korean place, which we didn't really mind. Britta had the same as usual, and I tried a soup we saw on someone else's table. Chunks of potato and pork falling off the bone, with some veggies in a spicy, meaty broth.

typhoon

2005-08-08T16:29:00.000+08:00

I only have five minutes, but a typhoon hit Qingdao last night. It was called "mai shao." It hit land in a different city so by the time it got here it had quieted down a bit, but it still meant torrential rains and fierce winds. We were teaching when it started but got home before the worst of it, which was about 12 at night. We did get completely soaked though, even though we had umbrellas. I have to say, it was not quite as exciting as it sounded (I don't think the winds quite got to 25 mph), but it is my first typhoon. (Portland has incredibly wimpy weather in pretty much all categories). The sea is very wild still, and the beaches are closed until further notice (which should be in a couple of days). I did go yesterday morning, and alhtough there was caution tape and a sign blocking off the sea, about 25 people were still swimming.
Well, back to class.

Flooding and Pinyin

2005-08-05T22:31:00.000+08:00

For those of you who have been following the story of the flooding of our porch with interest and dread, let me assure you that that madness has ended. This morning two men from the school came over, one of them the father of the headmaster. They unclogged the drain and swept the nasty, nasty water down. The rain has been pretty heavy the last couple days, and it was over a foot deep.

The father of the headmaster is a really nice man. When the vegetarian boxed lunch meant for one of the teachers was mistakenly eaten for the second time, he cooked her a vegetarian noodle soup. Also, when our washing machine broke, once again messing up our electricity, he convinced the headmaster to replace it with a brand new model. They didn't buy the old one for the apartment in the first place, so they had no obligation to replace it. He was concerned that we would electricute ourselves if we continued using it. Supposedly the installation isn't finished yet, but the new one seems like a huge improvement. No more emptying the water by tube into a bucket. (Now the tube goes into the sink. But still, it looks much, much nicer.)

The men arrived at the apartment only minutes before Gloria, my new Chinese tutor. This was our first session, and we spent all 90 minutes of it practicing basic sounds. I am bad at making the sounds. Worse than Emily, another teacher at Leewen and the one who referred Gloria to me. Gloria let that slip after I once again butchered the letter "e", revealing any progress I had made up until that point to be the illusion it was. In general she seems nice and patient, and she only charges about $3 American an hour. My main objective is to be more or less on par with the other students I'll study with when our formal Chinese class starts in a few weeks.

2005-08-05T22:28:00.000+08:00

I teach intermediate English for 6 1/2 hours a day, which can be interesting and draining. I've not spent this much time with 11-12 year olds since I was in 6th grade and I'd really forgotten what it was like. In some ways, I really like my students, and in other ways they seem impossibly immature. I must say though, by the time 8:30 at night rolls around, my sense of humor has also dropped a few maturity points as well. In my classes, the funniest thing, especially for boys, is the W.C. Most of these kids have learned British English, and so, if they want to be risque and inappropriate in English class, they do so by making jokes about the W.C. Of course to me, it's funny in a different way to hear 12 year old boys using the rather stuffy euphamism "W.C." for toilet. "You are W.C. man" is a big insult, followed closely by "Your mother live in W.C." Whenever we play a word game, one student always has to mention the W.C., followed by the requisite titters. Of course, next to the W.C., girl friends and boy friends are also a sure way to make a splash. If I want to make the class laugh uproariously, all I need to do is ask a student about his or her boyfriend or girlfriend. For example, one boy was goofing off, and in revenge, I asked him, "were you and your girlfriend at the park last night?" The two or three kids in the class who knew "girlfriend" in English started shouting "yes! yes! say yes!" and eventually the boy said yes. A kid translated the sentence and answer into Chinese, and the class started shrieking "you have a girlfriend." The boy turned bright red and the class (including the boy) burst into giggles. Another hilarious thing is if there is ever a picture of an ugly person, if someone's friend points to it and says "who's that?" the answer is often "your girlfriend." This means that actual sort of interaction between girls and boys is clearly taboo. One of my classes is impossibly noisy, to the point other teachers have to come over and complain (they are rare in that they are noisy but fairly strong students who overall do pay attention). One day I assigned them an essay "Why am I so noisy?" as homework. I received fairly hilarious results, given that their English writing skills are not quite at paragraph or perhaps even sentence level yet (that can be another post). A few days later, I threatened in desparation to seat them boy-girl, the ultimate punishment. I had to carry through, and I have to say, the effectiveness of the noise reduction was completely offset by the whining and sulking the new seating caused. Half the class refused to do any partner work with a person of the opposite sex, and one girl was almost in tears.
On a somewhat less humorous note, another big insult is to call someone Japanese. Saying that someone speaks Japanese, or is Japanese, or has been to Japan is probably the biggest put down after calling someone a W.C. man. In the text book I use, there is a Japanese foreign exchange student as one of the characters. When I showed his picture in the front of the book to the kids, one boy said, oh, he looks Chinese. When I said, no, he's Japanese, the kids were totally stunned and the boy who made the comment looked sheepish. It's hard to know what to say to comments like that. If something is really extreme, like "we should kill Japanese people," I usually frown and say it's inappropriate, but it's hard to know how to deal with this undercurrent of pervasive nationalism.
(I had another bad experience on a similar note. We were learning nationality, and to get the kids to answer, I asked them questions like "are you Korean?" and they would say "no, I'm Chinese!" I had asked them if they were Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese, and I decided for kicks to ask boy if he was Thai. After I did, all the kids started pointing and laughing and calling him Thai, and I realized he was slightly darker than the others. Then one kid shouted, "yeah, he's African!" and I knew I had made a horrible mistake that brought out a rather ugly side of Chinese racism. I told the kids that they were being inappropriate, and then I asked the lightest skinned student in the class if she was Thai to show that it was random, but I felt I probably should have thought that out better beforehand).

Personal Update

2005-07-29T18:42:00.000+08:00

I've been trying to make my posts interesting for people who don't want to read about the minutia of my life, only including personal information that is relevant to some entertaining story. But some people might want to hear more about our lives, so I think I'll start posting occasionally with the title "Personal Update." This way you'll know what you're in for.

Right now we're three weeks into the summer session, which means I'm half way through two classes and a third through the third (the third started a week later). Our schedule isn't really that bad, but we didn't come all this way to spend all our time in a classroom. We're counting the days.

The problem for me is there are other things that I've been putting on hold. Any day I plan to start studying Chinese and return to my grad school applications. It doesn't help that we have a washing machine that holds about 5 things at a time (not counting socks) and a dryer that is rope-based and sun-powered. (Did I mention this is monsoon season? And our porch floods a few inches when it rains?) That is where my free time goes during the week.

Another of the foreign teachers has started taking private Chinese lessons from a woman she found online. Although her verdict is mixed, the woman is cheap and takes housecalls, so I think I can squeeze in a couple hours a week. Once I finish my current book I'll return to the grad-school essay book, so that will cover my other main source of procrastination-guilt.

the bus

2005-07-27T21:32:00.000+08:00

Every day Britta and I take the bus to work. First we have a 15 minute walk, eventually leading us to the front gate of Qingdao University. The front gate is now, by the way, decorated with a gigantic red inflated arch that says coca cola, and has several large balloons, maybe 9 feet in diameter, hanging about 30 feet up. They say coca cola too, if you were wondering.

Then we cross the street and get on a bus, either the 31 or 316. Typically there is already a bus at the stop, ready to leave in the next couple minutes, and we never have to wait more than five minutes for one to arrive. The ride itself is uneventful. It takes about ten minutes, sitting or standing depending on the time of day. The 316 is usually a double-decker, which sounds like fun, but the roof on each deck is about 5 feet 7 inches, so I need to do some crouching. Sometimes people stare at us, and when there are any other Western people on the bus we give them dirty looks and complain to each other about how there are too many Westerners in Qingdao. We feel like natives when we ride the bus.

I'll tell a story about the time I was taking the bus to the beach after work to meet Britta and co. She had told me the name of the stop, and wrote it both in pinyin (in the roman alphabet) and in characters, so I was pretty well prepared. But after I got a seat, a young Chinese man starts a conversation with me. It turns out that he is a businessman for an international freight company, and he is happy to have a chance to try out his English. I oblige, and ask him to help me find my stop. We exchange phone numbers, and he tells me that if I need help with anything I can call him. Maybe I will. Or maybe he'll call me, and we'll speak English. But that was a few weeks ago, and I haven't heard from him since. BTW, I got the corn flavored ice-cream when I got to the beach, and it was good.

2005-07-27T21:29:00.000+08:00

The star pupil in one of my classes asked me to go out with her family, and a couple of days ago I went. After accepting her invitation I felt a little weird, as I wasn't sure if I was supposed to hang out with my students, and she is only 12, so I wasn't really sure what we would talk about. I ended up having a good and interesting time. I went out with her mother, who is an internalist at Qingdao university medical school, her father, who works in the local tax department, her 9 year-old brother and her 15 year old cousin. Her family picked me up in their car and drove me to a plaza near number 1 beach. There we ate at KFC, because her family wasn't sure if I liked CHinese food. The meal was a strange combination of fast food and Chinese hospitality: the family ordered almost half the menu for me, and kept putting more and more food in front of me. In total, I ate a chicken burger, some chicken wings fried and baked, french fries, corn, pepsi, and ice cream. And that wasn't even all of the food they kept trying to give me. It was somewhat embarrassing, the mother would take food away from the children and offer it to me. When they heard I didn't have a cell phone, the mother offered me her old one, and even though I refused, she still said she would give it to me. After dinner, we went to Zhong Shan park, or "Yat sen" park named after Sun Yatsen (he is "Sun Zhong shan" in Mandarin). Currently there is a latern festival, I don't know if it is a local holiday or nationwide. The park was full of displays made of silk stretched over metal frames lit from behind with lights. Many elements of Chinese traditional culture were represented, like dragons, pheonixes, flute players, (although no erhus). We spoke a random combination of English and Chinese, both the parents actually spoke a fair amount of English given that both said they didn't speak any English at all. We talked a bit about religion, and traditional Chinese culture, especially the Zodiac. IT's funny. I'm never sure what questions are polite to ask people, but almost the first two questions people seem to ask me are "what's your religion?" and "how much money do you make?" The second is a little embarassing for me, considering I make more than most people in Qingdao. For example, my student's mother makes 3,000 yuan a month, 2,000 less than I do, and she is a doctor. I also served as a walking Chinese-English dictionary. It was good for my self esteem to realize that I knew so many words, sometimes I even surprised myself by saying the word. Of course, there were the words I didn't know, and sometimes some funny charades or explanations so I could try to think of the word. Some words I guessed on, I hope I am right. THe best was when my student asked me how to say "qi li" in English. I asked what it is, and she said it was an animal with the head and body of a dragon, fins, and the feet of a pheonix. I told her that there wasn't a word in English, let me know if I'm wrong.
We walked through the park and the parents took pictures of us in front of almost every single display in various combinations, one combination always being me by myself. When they send me the photos, I will put them on the blog. We went going even after they turned off all the lights, because the mother found that the silk reflecting in the flash still looked nice. We were not the only ones doing this, it seemed like everyone in the park had come there for the sole purpose of photographing their family in front of various different lantern displays (and often pushing other people aside in the process). I suppose I can never complain about the picture taking at a family function again, given that our picture taking routine pales in comparison. One really amazing display was one of a fish, dragon and pheonix (the three lucky animals) made entirely out of dishes. Plates were scales and feathers, and spoons made the legs, etc.
All in all, I had a surprisingly good time with the family. Now in another class a boy (who is actually one of the worst students in the class and constantly acting out) invited me to go to Lao Mountain (a famous small mountain nearby), so I'll see what happens with that.

Plastic bags, etc

2005-07-23T11:11:00.000+08:00

I've been trying to think of ways to explain what is different about living in China. Much of it comes down to little things, like the materials of everyday objects.

For example, if you go to a restaurant that isn't especially fancy, and you ask for leftovers, the waitress will pour the food into a small plastic bag, tie it, put it into another small bag, and then give it to you. If you go to a street-food vendor and order a noodle or dumpling soup, they will serve it to you in a bowl that has a plastic bag covering it. There are small, neighborhood restaurant/bars that have kegs standing outside their door, and if you ask for beer to go they will give it to you in, once again, a plastic bag.

For a change of pace, I'll mention that you can find discount toilet paper in the supermarkets that has no cardboard roll in the middle, it's just toilet paper through and through. It will probably be a strange experience to go back to the states, where people are not willing to take these kinds of cost-saving measures.

Actual Chinese People

2005-07-21T10:29:00.000+08:00

Did we mention what we did on the Fourth of July? One of the other teachers, a guy named Eddie, build his own wood-burning grill out of soldered kitchen parts, and set up a little sausage grilling station on the beach. A group of westerners anywhere gets attention, but on the beach, in swimsuits, grilling sausages, you get extra attention. While Eddie was stoking the fire a bunch of Chinese guys came over to give their advice, more or less like you would expect to happen in the states. Mothers with curious children stop by.

And there was a young guy, a recent college graduate, who came over to work on his English. I didn't talk to him during the early part of the party, but once we started talking, it didn't take him long to start explaining all the virtues of Buddhism, and the importance of karma. He claims that Buddhism is growing in popularity, and that many top officials are practitioners that keep their faith secret.

I my best impression of my father, asking him the standard hard questions about religion, and we started to compare aspects of Buddhism with related features of Judaism and Christianity. He seemed to think he was on the way to converting me, which I tried to politely ignore. We exchanged phone numbers, so perhaps we'll talk again. He wants to be a businessman, and English skills are very useful in business.

driving

2005-07-18T10:22:00.000+08:00

when crossing the street in Qingdao, one always has to look both ways before crossing the street, even if the street is one way or an alley. For example, the road in front of our apartment is a one-way road, with a big arrow painted in the middle of it saying what direction to go, yet regularly (meaning almost once a day) we see cars driving the wrong way down the street. This makes crossing the street somewhat difficult, especially as cars speed up when they see pedestrians instead of slowing down. I heard that if there is an accident, it is assumed to be the pedestrian's fault, so it doesn't really give cars impetus to slow down. Also, cars seem to be in an incredible hurry, which is ironic because the general craziness of the driving means that most roads are chronically clogged in traffic jams. Indeed, as Dan says, it seems like the driving is more reckless than fast. The other problem is that stoplights are apparently a fairly new thing in Qingdao, and some drivers seem to see them as optional. That means that even if the oncoming traffic has a red light, that doesn't necessarily mean that cars won't come whizzing by at about 50 miles an hour. We live behind Qingdao university, and at the entrance of the university there is a large gate with a paved taxi drop-off area. The area is marked off from the street by a large cross-walk, but I have seen cars, when there is a red light, speed up and drive on the cross-walk (as pedestrians jump out of the way) and then, with out slowing down a single bit, merge into traffic without looking and cut several people off. Cars use their horns the way ambulances use sirens, generally beeping at anything even remotely close. Sometimes in the busier parts of the city, cars drive and park on the sidewalk, so it is possible to be walking down the sidewalk and hear a beep from behind, only to turn around and find a black mercedes about 3 feet behind you. Even though the traffic is crazy, it is possible to kind of figure out a rhythm for crossing, or at least do what the other Chinese pedestrians do.

About 2 days ago though, we walked by an accident where a pedestrian was hit by a taxi which had been turning onto a small side street without stopping or slowing down. The man lay motionless on the ground, and an ambulance and large crowd stood around. It was a sobering reminder that figuring out how to cross the street most times doesn't make us invincible, and we always need to be on our guard

2005-07-16T13:48:00.000+08:00

Today I asked my students what their favorite toy was in my class of 8-10 year olds, and one boy answered "ipod." WWMS? (what would Mao say?)
In the same class, were were learning ages, and I made them guess how old I was. The first guess was 17, and the next guess was 34. I guess If you average the two out you might be somewhat close. One kid guessed I was 11. I think his English might of been off, because all the other kids laughed and he looked embarrassed.

This past week, I started one of my summer courses. Next week, the other two will start. So for the next 5 weeks, I will teach M-F from 1:15-8:30 with a half-hour break for dinner. On Saturday I teach 8:30-5:00 with a 2 1/2 lunch hour break, and on Sunday I teach an evening class. It adds up to 40 hours a week, which is a lot of teaching, but the worst is never having a full day off. It's just for 5 weeks, and then my class load decreases, and after 6 weeks, I go back to just teaching on weekends. The one nice thing is that because in our contract we only have to work 80 hours a month, we get paid lots of overtime for working so much.

Summer Session

2005-07-15T18:56:00.000+08:00

I just finished my first week of summer-session classes. There are actually two sessions, each lasting 6 weeks. Two of my classes started this week, and one starts next week, so I only have 5 weeks of 3-class weekdays. This is in addition to my 10 hour weekends, btw. Yes, I know, some people have to really work hard, and by the end of August I'll have a fairly relaxing schedule again.

It's been nice to start these classes after already having three weekends of teaching under my belt. I've had time to get used to speaking (and yes, occasionally singing, my solo performances since my Bar Mitzvah) in front of a roomful of children. The hardest part has been developing the right manner, that lets them know that I might be young, I might be nowhere near as scary as the teachers at their normal schools, and there might be good reason to believe that I don't know what I'm doing, but they still have to do what I say. I had a confrontation with a young teenager today which was a bit of a test, but I think I got out of it with the boy in question more or less cowed, and my authority in the class preserved or even enhanced. I'm really no disciplinarian, I still tend to laugh at bad behavior while I correct it, but I'm improving.

Food note:
After class Britta and I went to the supermarket in Jusco, the mall Britta mentioned in her last post. I got a popular Chinese egg-crepe snack. It starts out as a crepe on a flat metal pan - the same kind they use in France. But before they flip it over they crack two eggs onto the top side, and kind of spread them around. Then they flip it over, spread on a brown sauce (I think it adds a little sweetness), some chili oil and scallion, and then add the toppings. I had fried bread, lettuce and spicy fried-chicken tenders. They fold it up, sort-of like a burrito, and stick it in a bag. You tend to find some variation (different toppings, the rest is the same) wherever there is a variety of hot street food, and even at this ritzy supermarket it cost about 60 cents.

random bits

2005-07-12T22:34:00.000+08:00

In one of my classes we were playing a game at the end of the class which involved dividing the class up into two teams. I let each team give themselves a name, and one team, headed by a very outspoken and somewhat cheeky girl, chose the name "Mao Ze Dong." The teaching assistant, a student from Qingdao university looked fairly shocked. The other team, which consisted mainly of boys, picked the name "AC Milan" after a soccer club. It's funny. The students in the class were all about 10-12, born 20 years after Mao's death, and the TA and I being in our very early 20s/late teens were born about 10 years after his death. It's strange to think that even though Mao had an incredible role in shaping China in the second half of the century, there are now two generations for whom Mao was never a presence. It was hard to tell if the girl was being irreverent or defiant or respectful or just trying to get a rise out of us in choosing that name. Playing along, when calling someone from the team forward I said, "Mao Zedong, come to the front of the class." All the students and the TA started to laugh, and I too couldn't keep from giggling. It was so strange to stand in a Chinese classroom and giggle at the thought of Chairman Mao.
China in many ways does not really seem all that communist. Around me, college students are chatting on-line and playing video games at the internet cafe, and consumer culture seems to be all over, there are billboards and advertisements posted everywhere, outstripping the occasional government slogan in every way. Across the street from our school is JUSCO, and upscale shopping mall full of designer shops and a large department and grocery store selling almost any product one could want, from barbeque grills to cell phones to lego. Of course, just because there are tons of material goods does not necessarily make a place capitalist (well, maybe it does, but I don't think the veneer of consumer goods necessarily means that CHina is just like the U.S.). It was interesting, I asked another class I had today of kids about 11-13 what they wanted to be when they grew up. Many kids said web designer (a vocab word), several said doctor and teacher, and one kid said beggar. All the kids started laughing and being silly, and one boy shouted out president. I asked him if he wanted to be president, and he looked really shocked. I asked the kids who wanted to be president, and they all laughed and shook their heads. I told them that in America many children want to be president, and they were really surprised. I then asked them if they wanted to be chairman, and they all shook their heads no. I suppose if the chairman is some old man who you can't elect and is swathed in numerous layers of corrupt bureaucracy, it's not a position to really try to aspire to. Maybe it's kind of like wanting to be the pope when one grows up.

On another note, I bought a bathing suit the other day, it's two pieces, one which consists of a long top that comes down to my belly button, and the other which is a bathing suit bottom with a skirt over it. All in all, it maybe shows an inch of my stomach and covers my upper thighs. It's in a red and white hawaiian print. Chinese women wear quite conservative bathing suits, most of them have skirts or short-type bottoms, and look like American suits from about 50 years ago, except in really bright nylon. The men on the other hand, only wear really skimpy speedos. (Dan was not willing to follow local custom). The beaches are nice, not white sand and clear blue water, but perfectly good for spending a day lying out or swimming (there is a mark-up on the ice cream, unfortunately). The beaches are fairly crowded, but not nearly as bad as I thought, there is plenty of room to find a spot and lie fairly undisturbed, except for the people stopping to take photos. The beaches are actually more crowded on cloudy days, because people prefer to go to the beach when it's less hot and the sun isn't as bright. Also, most people lie under umbrellas to avoid getting a tan. Tans, especially for women, are not very popular, yet lying on the beach is, so it can be difficult to reconcile the two. Most women in Qingdao carry parasols to keep off the sun, which is actually very practical, because summer is monsoon season and it can start raining at pretty much any moment, so most women have complete all-weather protection.

I don't speak Chinese

2005-07-12T21:42:00.000+08:00

A while ago my brother sent me an email pointing out that I don't speak Chinese, and asking how I manage to live in China. I thought it was a good question.

I don't speak Chinese, and practically nobody that you run into in shops or restaurants speaks any English. So something has got to give. The way it works out is that I, personally, have very limited contact with Chinese people outside of school. The exceptions are people who occasionally approach us Foreigners individually or collectively to try out their English. That's the exception.

I ride the bus to and from work everyday, which requires dropping a bill or coin in a slot or scanning a card. I typically either eat out with the other teachers or eat a boxed lunch that the school orders in. (Four cooked dishes, and you can get a large container of white rice, a steamed bun, and soup, typically egg drop with tomato or seaweed or something.) We plan to start cooking soon, maybe later this week, but we still have some more cleaning to do. Otherwise I buy small items like bottled water, groceries, or ice cream bars by myself, but that's no problem.

As for teaching, all of my classes are either little kids (up to about 10) with Chinese teaching assistants or bigger kids (12ish to 20ish) who know enough collectively that I can get them to understand.

If you can read between the lines, I rely on Britta to help me. I may start individual or pair Chinese lessons this summer with another of the teachers, but it's hard to find the time extra-curricular work now that the summer session classes have started. Monday through Friday, in addition to the weekend classes. More on that later. But for the moment I'm pretty dependent.

2005-07-12T12:54:00.000+08:00

so, we actually do do other things besides eat, but one last thing about food. We were in the grocery store with a Chinese girl we met, and there was this large bin of what looked like little hard candies in bright colored wrappers, except the side of the bin said "beef." I asked our friend if they were really beef flavored, and she said that they were. She said that now many young children preferred to eat candy to nutritious food, it was hard to get them to eat anything. These were little beef "hard candies" so parents could trick their children into getting a nutritious protein-filled meal. I didn't buy any, but maybe when I return to America I will bring some back as a gift for all my friends and family.

Where I continue...

2005-07-09T15:20:00.000+08:00

...to test exactly how much people want to know about the food we eat.

Returning to the topic of ice cream, I'll say that I've been on a lucky streak, it's very easy to find that you've spent 1.5 kwai (about 18 cents) on a lousy bar. So I don't disagree with Britta's comments.

Meals. Britta mentioned that the waiters expect you to order 5 seconds after getting the menu, and that's not an exageration. We are an amusement and a curiosity everywhere we go, and restaurants are not an exception. But at the restaurants we're also a minor annoyance, since we take longer to order than anyone else and ask strange questions.

There is one place we go pretty often since it's about three minutes from the apartment and pretty good. The other day they resorted to giving us paper menus to take home. Lillian (the other Swarthmore teacher) and I went back there for lunch today, and she had done her homework, so she ordered fried rice, their clam specialty, and a cold noodle and veggie dish. The specialty turned out to be scrambled eggs with clams, peas, and cubed ham, which I definitely would order again. The other two were pretty good too.

We've all agreed that we need to find several good, inexpensive restaurants, with good dishes that we know how to order. We're not there yet, we still have mixed results. I wish the food were as good as Britta and Lillian say it was in Beijing. But overall Qingdao seems to be a much better place to live, and we're starting to get the hang of ordering. Once our kitchen cleaning adventure is over, we can even start cooking.

I am unworthy to post on this blog

2005-07-08T15:24:00.000+08:00

Ok, sorry for my recent laxness. Here I'll try to make amends.

First, on the ice cream. At first I was really skeptical, since the first thing I tasted was a Chinese version of the cone filled with ice cream and covered with sauce, except with the flavor completely subtracted. I was thinking I'd have to stick with the Nestle bars and cones, which are in fact widely available. But I have honestly not ordered a bad bar since. I've gotten the condensed milk with raisins which was quite good, a vanilla with ribbons of crisp chocolate sauce throughout, and an extremely accurate honeydew. The corn, for the record, is actually quite good, although I only had a taste of someone elses. I'll get one myself once I've exhausted the other exciting prospects.

More later, I forgot that we have to go somewhere.

food

2005-07-06T21:28:00.000+08:00

so, upon several requests, I am writing a blog about the food. Someone else who will not be mentioned, who has currently not quite been carrying his or her weight with the blogging, will have to blog later to give a different fresh perspective. I have to admit that my view of Qingdao food has been colored by the semester I spent in Beijing. In some ways, Beijing and Qingdao have similar styles of food because they are both part of Northern China and belong to the Northern school of cooking. This style is a bit heavier and wheat based instead of rice based. The main meats are pork and lamb, and chicken is less common. Foods are often more vinegary and salty than sweet or spicy (though there is a good spice to many dishes). Steamed buns and dumplings and pancakes, especially with egg and scallion, are common. Because Qingdao is on the Yellow sea, seafood is also very big here. The food however, and I can't tell whether this is an overall phenomenon or just because of my inexperience/ineptitude with the local cuisine, does not seem to be nearly as good as it was in Beijing. In Beijing, the dumplings were incredible, especially spinach and egg, pork and scallion, lamb and carrot, and mushroom dumplings. Here, the best dumplings we've had have been fish dumplings (and some pretty good cucumber and egg dumplings), but the lamb dumplings have been a disappointment, and when we've tried to order spinach dumplings, the waitress looks like we've asked for something completely unheard of. In general, it's been really hard to find tasty vegetable dishes. There's a group of hole-in-the-wall restaurants near our house (we live right behind Qingdao university, so they seem to cater to the college student crowd) that have a pretty nice cucumber and garlic dish, although I have had better versions in Beijing (not to be a snob). I surprising number of restaurants do not even have spinach or broccoli, both quite common vegetables, and the cabbage dish I ordered at one restaurant was basically cabbage soaked in vinegar. A part of it is that it's kind of hard to order in China because the waitress hands you the menu and then expects you to order within about 5 seconds of getting the menu, and dishes aren't necessarily named descriptively, or you have to be very familiar with it to know that "5 treasure eggplant" means fried eggplant with peanuts, or whatever it is. I've seen other people eating what look like very good vegetable dishes, so it's very possible that I am just ordering the more disgusting dishes on the menu. My friend goes into a restaurants, makes a quick survey of what other people are eating, and then orders by pointing at something someone's eating that looks good and says "I want what they're eating." So far that seems like the best method. We also are having a hard time finding good restaurants. Our school is in a somewhat posh area with lots of 5-star hotels, an upscale mall, a versace store (the real thing) and close to a large Korean neighborhood (there are lots of Koreans in Qingdao because it's basically just a short trip across the Yellow sea from Seoul). That does not mean it's a good place for restaurants, because most restaurants are not that great and a little pricey. We did find a good cheap noodle place, but if one doesn't want noodles everyday, one is out of luck. There some Korean and Japanese restaurants close by and lots of western fast food chains, like Popeyes, KFC, and MacDonalds. There are also lots of coffee houses, usually named things like "American Coffe house" or "Starbugs coffee" Coffee is also quite expensive, at about american prices. (An average lunch costs between 5-15 kuai, or 75 cents to two dollars, and an average dinner costs between 10-25 kuai, or a little over one dollar to about 3 dollars, although at western places or japanese/korean restaurants, a dinner could be 40-60 kuai, and at most small places you can get a meal for 5-8 kuai, and on the street you can by filling snacks or a small meanl for between half a kuai to about 3 kuai. Kuai is slang for yuan, or RMB, and the coversion rate is 8.2 kuai to the dollar). So basically, you can eat really cheaply or spend quite a bit of money. We (being the people in our apartment) are still searching for the perfect little family restaurant with really good food at reasonable prices, but it's hard, again, especially because our school is in a business district. I prefer the cheaper food, as it is generally better and more authentic. Also, fruit is usually very good and really cheap, it's sold on the street for about 2 kuai a pound, and I have been buying lots of plums. I bought some nectarines and cherries, and they were okay, but not as good as the plums. Watermelon is in season, and we had some at the 4th of July bbq, it was very good.
Ice cream is very popular in China, you can buy it on almost every street corner, and in a country where it's not really acceptable to eat while walking around on the street, ice cream seems to be the main exception. In general the ice cream is not as good, none of it is at all creamy or really rich, and the chocolate tends to be waxy and flavorless. My favorite type of ice cream is actually a milk flavored popscicle with raisins in it, I think they might use condensed milk to make it. I also had a cheese flavored ice cream bar that was surprisingly good, the middle tasted a little bit like cheese cake, and the chocolate coating was somewhat creamier and dark chocolate. The worst ice cream I had was an ice cream bar with a fake banana filling, the banana tasted very chemically, and the icecream was really icy and the chocolate chalky, I couldn't eat it. In general though, I do enjoy the icecream, and it makes a fine snack, especially considering it's in the 90s everyday and very humid. Some ice cream I haven't yet dared try, such as the ice cream with a picture of corn on the outside. Somehow, I don't think corn ice cream would be very good, no matter what the permutation.
So, I'll write more about food at some other time, and perhaps someone else who will not be named will also write about his perspective.