a day in the life
today, i will share with you pictures from my everyday life.
where to start on my patchy virtual tour? i guess a glance at what the streets outside the college look like.
do you see all the garbage and pollution and stuff in the middle of the street? yikes. it takes some getting used to. there are few-to-no public garbage cans here, so people throw all their garbage in the street. so the city is filthy.
for those of you who don't know, 100 years ago, shijiazhuang was a tiny twon with just a few hundred people living here. today there are... 2 or 3 million in the city proper, and another 6 or 7 million in the surrounding area, which they still count as shijiazhuang. why did all the people come here? factories. from what i understand, no one really meant for this to be a place where lots of people actually LIVED. it was meant to be a place for factories. but you know how that is. workers move in, then more people and more... it's mostly coal stuff, which means if you don't clean every few days, everything is covered in a fine-to-thick layer of coal, even if you keep your windows closed. new buildings look old before they're even done being built. my white socks are really suffering.
that's after a twenty minute roundtrip walk. it's ridiculous. that's why i like the city more at night.
the streets aren't uniformly well-lit, but most establishments have neon, which i think is neat. wasteful of electricity, but pretty.
there are some pretty spots in the city.
but the river that looks so pretty from a distance ... this is starting to feel really repetitive. um, it's really polluted:)
sometimes you get the feeling that people don't think about what they're doing here. like workers aren't really putting their all into what they do.
but maybe that's just my imagination. at least people ride their bikes instead of driving nine times out of ten.
so maybe it's not because they're concerned about the environment, but because they can't afford cars. still. it's nice to live in a big city with this few cars. you know what too many cars leads to.
gross smog:) this is what the air here looks like after a few days without rain. and let me tell you, it doesn't rain very often here. on days when it's especially thick, when you go out, you'll see some people wearing face masks. that's really really smart. these people will live longer than the rest of us.
so the above picture is taken on campus here. the building you can see most of is the caf. it's three stories. the ground floor is where most of the students go. they pick out food they like, pay for it, have it put in a flimsy plastic sack, and usually bring it back to their rooms to eat. my friends and i usually eat on the second floor when we eat there. on the second floor, there's more food you can order and stand and wait while they cook it up. it's smart to bring your own bowl and chopsticks though if you don't eat out of the sack, because they don't really wash dishes. they just rinse them in cold water:) no kidding. no soap or anything. sanitary, eh? but there's some tasty food up there for those who know how to order well.
i don't know what's on the third floor. it's usually closed:)
this is the building right next to the caf, where i teach all my classes. the pictures are taken from my bedroom window, so you can see how nice and close everything is for me. my six classes are on the third and fourth floors, all the classrooms on side of the building you can see. fun times.
the students here are funny. i'll tell you more about their lives here later, but for now i'll just say that ping pong is a REALLY big deal here. it's not a hobby. it's a sport. and one to be taken seriously.
the student i've gotten to know the best so far is wendy.
she's really cool. she teaches me chinese. and she takes it really seriously. sometimes i think she puts more time into our thrice weekly lessons that she gives me for free than i do for my classes for all my students. this week, she taught me some children's games in china. the other foreign teachers scoff and say, "isn't she supposed to be teaching you to speak, helen?" ok, yeah, but hey. they're my lessons. let me learn what i want to:) and that cool jumping game was super fun. she also teaches me some classical chinese poetry and lots of vocabulary and pronunciation. i'm a horrible student because (don't tell her this) i don't really have a driving passion for chinese. i just want to learn enough to get me by while i'm here. i learn because it's fun and useful for now. but i admit that i don't spend hours practicing the way my students spend hours trying to learn english.
so what do i do if i don't practice my chinese very much? well, duh. i do have a full time job, thank you very much. when i'm not in the classroom (which i am 18 hours a week), i'm sometimes grading and working.
240 students are a lot when you've had each of them turn in a page or two written in english that's begging for alteration. and teaching is extra challenging what with the fact that i didn't get a day of training on how to teach this. and of course, there's the fact that we don't have textbooks to teach out of. this whole flipping year is up to us to schedule out. whatever we think of is what we teach. yikes:) sometimes that works out well, and sometimes it doesn't. definetly a good learning experience, anyway.
so that's a little about my life here. ta da!
where to start on my patchy virtual tour? i guess a glance at what the streets outside the college look like.
do you see all the garbage and pollution and stuff in the middle of the street? yikes. it takes some getting used to. there are few-to-no public garbage cans here, so people throw all their garbage in the street. so the city is filthy.
for those of you who don't know, 100 years ago, shijiazhuang was a tiny twon with just a few hundred people living here. today there are... 2 or 3 million in the city proper, and another 6 or 7 million in the surrounding area, which they still count as shijiazhuang. why did all the people come here? factories. from what i understand, no one really meant for this to be a place where lots of people actually LIVED. it was meant to be a place for factories. but you know how that is. workers move in, then more people and more... it's mostly coal stuff, which means if you don't clean every few days, everything is covered in a fine-to-thick layer of coal, even if you keep your windows closed. new buildings look old before they're even done being built. my white socks are really suffering.
that's after a twenty minute roundtrip walk. it's ridiculous. that's why i like the city more at night.
the streets aren't uniformly well-lit, but most establishments have neon, which i think is neat. wasteful of electricity, but pretty.
there are some pretty spots in the city.
but the river that looks so pretty from a distance ... this is starting to feel really repetitive. um, it's really polluted:)
sometimes you get the feeling that people don't think about what they're doing here. like workers aren't really putting their all into what they do.
but maybe that's just my imagination. at least people ride their bikes instead of driving nine times out of ten.
so maybe it's not because they're concerned about the environment, but because they can't afford cars. still. it's nice to live in a big city with this few cars. you know what too many cars leads to.
gross smog:) this is what the air here looks like after a few days without rain. and let me tell you, it doesn't rain very often here. on days when it's especially thick, when you go out, you'll see some people wearing face masks. that's really really smart. these people will live longer than the rest of us.
so the above picture is taken on campus here. the building you can see most of is the caf. it's three stories. the ground floor is where most of the students go. they pick out food they like, pay for it, have it put in a flimsy plastic sack, and usually bring it back to their rooms to eat. my friends and i usually eat on the second floor when we eat there. on the second floor, there's more food you can order and stand and wait while they cook it up. it's smart to bring your own bowl and chopsticks though if you don't eat out of the sack, because they don't really wash dishes. they just rinse them in cold water:) no kidding. no soap or anything. sanitary, eh? but there's some tasty food up there for those who know how to order well.
i don't know what's on the third floor. it's usually closed:)
this is the building right next to the caf, where i teach all my classes. the pictures are taken from my bedroom window, so you can see how nice and close everything is for me. my six classes are on the third and fourth floors, all the classrooms on side of the building you can see. fun times.
the students here are funny. i'll tell you more about their lives here later, but for now i'll just say that ping pong is a REALLY big deal here. it's not a hobby. it's a sport. and one to be taken seriously.
the student i've gotten to know the best so far is wendy.
she's really cool. she teaches me chinese. and she takes it really seriously. sometimes i think she puts more time into our thrice weekly lessons that she gives me for free than i do for my classes for all my students. this week, she taught me some children's games in china. the other foreign teachers scoff and say, "isn't she supposed to be teaching you to speak, helen?" ok, yeah, but hey. they're my lessons. let me learn what i want to:) and that cool jumping game was super fun. she also teaches me some classical chinese poetry and lots of vocabulary and pronunciation. i'm a horrible student because (don't tell her this) i don't really have a driving passion for chinese. i just want to learn enough to get me by while i'm here. i learn because it's fun and useful for now. but i admit that i don't spend hours practicing the way my students spend hours trying to learn english.
so what do i do if i don't practice my chinese very much? well, duh. i do have a full time job, thank you very much. when i'm not in the classroom (which i am 18 hours a week), i'm sometimes grading and working.
240 students are a lot when you've had each of them turn in a page or two written in english that's begging for alteration. and teaching is extra challenging what with the fact that i didn't get a day of training on how to teach this. and of course, there's the fact that we don't have textbooks to teach out of. this whole flipping year is up to us to schedule out. whatever we think of is what we teach. yikes:) sometimes that works out well, and sometimes it doesn't. definetly a good learning experience, anyway.
so that's a little about my life here. ta da!