China Update #1
Hey! Somebody tell me how to put all this behind a cut and I'll stop ruining LiveJournal.
Hello everyone from the China!
I’ve been here for five days now. I’m writing from my apartment, but I don’t have internet yet so I’ll have to take this down to my friends’ apartment and upload it from one of their machines. I hope to achieve internet full interwebs functionality over the course of the next week. My landlord has suggested I simply run a cable from a nearby internet café. We’ll see how that works out.
I’ll try to post at semi-regular intervals, and when I eventually get a connection here at the house I’ll hopefully be posting some videos I’ve been taking. In the meantime, here are some names that would be likely to come up often in these posts:
The Cast
Barrie
Barrie is a friend of mine from Berry College. We started the Potato Bandits together with a select few others, and were roommates for several years. She can usually get me to do things that I want to do, but otherwise would not have the guts to attempt. Hence, China. She moved here four years ago following another college friend of ours, Wes. Wes has since moved on to teach and go to school in Shanghai, but I’m sure we’ll be hearing from him again. Barrie has taught at her current school three years. She is the girlfriend of Sonny. Barrie does a poor impression of a snake.
Sonny
Sonny is a Chinese man who grew up in Inner Mongolia. He studies at a local university, and is a semester away from graduating. Chinese schools at this level are ridiculously competitive. To get into his current program, he was one of three students in his entire college to pass the required exam. He’s a smart cookie. His goal is to teach English in Japan along with Barrie, whom he has been dating for almost two years. His English fluency is great, and he has been instrumental in helping me run around Changchun fetching the items I need to set up my house. Sonny does a great impression of a snake.
Andrea/Gretchen
Andrea went to school with Barrie and I, and the three of us performed in the college improv troupe, Easy Baked Improv, together. Gretchen is fluent in German, and has lived in Germany studying at intervals. Because of her affinity with the country and language, (and because she is blond and blue-eyed) at some point early in our relationship she garnered the moniker “Gretchen”. These names will be used interchangeably without warning. Keep up.
Mr. Wang
An administrator of some sort in the school Barrie and Andrea teach in, he is the owner of the apartment I am currently leasing. Apparently China works like this: If I do you a favor, then you will do me a favor. Then, because of the favor you just did me, I will do something for you. Now you owe me. It is because of this cyclical pattern of suspect altruism that I have this house. Barrie at some point did a job for Mr. Wang, and now he has kindly allowed me to rent this amazing place for much cheaper than he would normally have rented it. Now it seems we are beholden to him…and he keeps doing us favors which makes us all really nervous. We are already promised to teach extra classes for him. If he takes us out to lunch one more time, we might technically count as his property under China law.
The Set
ChangChun
Nestled comfortably in the middle of the Jilin Province, Changchun is located in the north-east of China. It’s a 12 hour train ride down to Beijing (or 8 hours on the fancy and super expensive new speed train) and about the same up to the border of Mongolia. It’s a pretty large city, which I would ignorantly put on par with Macon in size. Maybe. Except with a bajillion people. Seriously. And that’s just in the apartment I live in. Changchun boasts a 24 hour McDonalds and (for some reason) about 6 KFCs. These restaurants are strangely enough some of the most expensive around, so you save going to these places for the truly special events. Your anniversary, for example.
Edit. I have learned today that Changchun has about 6.5 million people in it. This is roughly equivalent to a bajillion, so my original assertion was correct.
We all live extremely close to each other. I can look out of my sixth-story window and easily see Barrie and Andrea’s campus right down the road. It takes less than ten minutes for me to walk from my door to their apartment on campus. Sonny’s school is similarly close, and he often bikes from his campus to here in about ten minutes or so. In between all these locations are a thousand small places to eat on the street, along with all the other small businesses you could think of. I have an internet café and a small grocery in the first floor of my building, and three places to get haircuts within a stone’s throw of my door. So far despite its much talked-about size, China seems conveniently located.
As mentioned before, my apartment is pretty amazing. Two floors connected with a steep metal staircase, two bathrooms, two huge living-room-esque areas, and several bedrooms. Clearly this is meant for either families or for groups of roommates. I’ve spent about a third of my set-up cash so far getting normal supplies for the house (food, sheets, cleaning materials, school supplies, etc.) Big purchases have been limited to a stovetop that works with the gas in the building, and maybe later a microwave if I can get one cheap. I’m pretty excited about how all this is shaping up. I’ll be ready for you guys all to visit by the end of next week or so.
Update 7/10/07
I start classes tomorrow. I’m a shade terrified still, but only a shade. Specifically vermilion. I have a pretty nice schedule, with Tuesday being the only really intense day. It falls like this: I have no classes Monday, three on Tuesday, and then one class each on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I’ll also be in charge of the schools “English corner” once a week. That’s basically their version of English club. So really my week will stay pretty clear until Mr. Wang tells us that his class are ready to start also. Which reminds me:
MR. WANG UPDATE.
Barrie and I went to Mr. Wang’s office today to ask about the classes. We had assumed they would start today like most of the other classes at area schools, but we were told it might be another week or two before these special classes would be organized. Then he told us what these classes were going to focus on. Apparently a group of graduate students are preparing for a trip to study in Italy. We are supposed to help them get ready for this trip because the students are afraid they won’t understand the European/Western ways of education in general and the Italian accent specifically. So it all boils down to the fact that we are the closest things to Italians that they have available…clearly we’ll have a working knowledge of the Italian state! So we’ve already started doing some research, by which I mean finding websites that highlight foreign accents and laughing at them. I have a feeling we are more than qualified for this job.
END UPDATE
I had an adventure last night involving trying to produce hot water. Not something you would imagine to be a difficult task, right? My house has come equipped with about seventeen different ways to heat water. But remember, China is the Land of False Promise! So each of these seventeen ways is missing a (usually) small but critical element…each seeming so simple…yet each tantalizingly just out of reach. All this has boiled down to some pretty cold showers in the mornings, so I took it upon myself to invest in a water heating coil that is designed to fit down inside a gigantic thermos that I also invested in. It seems like a pretty self-explanatory process. You fill the thermos with water, and put the coil in and it gets hot. Well, somewhere in this one-step process I failed to follow some unwritten China-physics rule, and when I plugged in my heating coil, the electric plug exploded in a cloud of acrid black smoke. I was left in a momentary state of shock, with my entire hand blackened from the loud POWF! But otherwise I was left unhurt. I had to keep feeling my hand around the black areas for a moment…it sure seemed like I should be feeling pain somewhere…I was shaken enough to think maybe I was hurting but I just couldn’t feel it yet. Then I noticed that not only had the cable literally torn itself in half, but the wall socket it was plugged into wasn’t working anymore. This is still the case, which sucks because it’s the only electric outlet in the kitchen and it’s the one the fridge was plugged into. Now I’m pretty wary of most Chinese meat products as it is, and I wasn’t interested in seeing what sort of crime against nature is produced when these products go bad. So I frantically pulled all the extension cables available to me into a giant pile and eventually was able to finagle power from across the room. The sausage/meat-tubes were saved! Now I can mix them with eggs in the morning! Yay?
The good news from today is that I was able to get my stove working finally, so I was able to cook for the first time since moving in. I feel pretty good about my ability to make the foods in China. I have found several foodstuffs here I thought I’d have to go without: peanut butter and jelly, hot dogs (sort of), mustard, pickles, cheese, etc. Most of these are ridiculously expensive by comparison to their more Chinese-ish counterparts sitting next to them on the shelves, but I’ll happily pay the difference for a good sharp cheddar. Now I’ll just need to find some half-decent potato chips and it’ll be like my diet from home never changed. Good thing too…the last thing I wanted when I took this teaching job in China was to have to experience new things.
Update 9/11/07
Today was a day of successes! Plural! Not only did I manage to cook eggs with my new stove without burning them, but my class at eight this morning was awesome! I’ll preface all this by saying I stole almost everything directly from watching Barrie and Andrea teach the day before. I had freshmen in my first class, and I really had them right from the start. I knew if I was quiet at the beginning it would be tough to get them later, so I came in loud and stayed that way till the end of class. Actually I got there this morning a little early and put my stuff in the room. There was already a full class inside with a few kids messing around with the audio-visual equipment. They looked like they knew what they were doing, to the point where I questioned whether or not I had the right room…maybe some other teacher had instructed them to play music and surf the web on the big screen? After I put my stuff down I left, waited in the hall until my watch said it was about time, and came in the back. In the very back of the class there was one guy sleeping. Everyone else was up front as far as they could go, but he was sort of hiding. So I made a point of standing behind him and waiting until the tittering of the other students made him look up. He slowly turned around and jumped when he saw me. It was great, and I had the other students after that. I started every class today the same way. When you ask a Chinese student “How are you?” they will ALWAYS respond with “Fine, thank you, and you?”. It’s the response that is in every textbook and they’ve been learning it since they were young. So before I even introduced myself I wrote this phrase on the board and said I never wanted to hear it again in class. That I would be asking how they were every day, and every day they’d better tell me something besides “fine”. I practiced with them by coming in the door loudly several times and always demanding different answers. THEN I introduced myself, and we went forward. I ran out of stuff about half way through, so I made up a few activities on the fly to fill time. One example of a time-waster project was I had them all write five things about themselves on a piece of paper, and then split them into groups to come up with questions of things they’d like to know about me. Then we sort of had a question and answer session back and forth. It worked really well, and I didn’t have to stall but for about three minutes at the end waiting for the bell.
This process repeated basically along the same lines for the other two classes too. The differences were in my 1:30 class of seniors their level of English proficiency was way beyond what I’d expected, so we went through the material even faster, so we ended up using some pretty complex discussion questions that I had brought (ex. Who lies more, men or women? Why do you think so?) All of them were controversial in some form or another, so I broke them into groups and wandered discussing these things with them. The Post-Graduate class at 3:30 was the toughest. The class only has 4 people in it, all of them doctors and all of them with very poor English. But then my boss allowed some English majors to join in, so I had two hard extremes to work with. It took a while to find a balance, and even at the end it was tough not to have either the doctors frustrated or the English majors bored. Everyone seemed low energy anyway, so I ended up not using some of the other games that went over well before, and just sat them down and we talked. I see this group 2 times a week, and I’m not excited about it. I’m really happy how every class went, but I’m just not sure how to handle this group. The doctors are only taking English because they are required to pass and English proficiency exam before they can proceed with their study. I’m sure I’ll figure out something.
Tomorrow I will normally have a class, but for some reason it doesn’t start until a few weeks after the others do. So I’m free tomorrow all day until my school’s English club meets at 6:30. They have told me I can run it for as long as I want, but I am planning on about an hour and half, or until all the students get bored. I’m not sure what I’m going to do for it. I don’t know yet how much is my initiative and how much student input there will be. I might just do discussion questions again, and maybe some English-related game that I steal directly from some website or another. More on this later.
Update 9/12/07
My school is a brisk 20 minute walk from my house, going what I have been assured by my students must be the absolute longest route possible. One of them has kindly offered to show me their secret short cut, so soon I might be able to sleep that much later in the mornings. As positive as that might sound, I sort of like my path as it is. I get to pass through several centers of activity, and at one point cut through a narrow shanty-town-esque market street that I have found myself mentally referring to as Diagon Alley. As I dodge chickens and half-naked toddlers, I also have to bend in half to duck under the tarps that hang over the path. They are there to keep the sun and rain off the produce and people, but for some reason they thought it was okay to hang them about five feet off the ground. That’s cool if you’re the average China-person, but for me that doesn’t quite cut it. I don’t mind the ducking, and the locals get a kick out of it every day both coming and going. I also pass about a hundred places for people to get their hair cut, which I guess makes sense…Chinese boys and men keep their hair cut to state regulation with nearly no exception. Girl’s hair is like a radio station…the best hits of yesterday and today. There will be a group of girls on the sidewalk, and some will have the giant poof hair that was only just barely acceptable in the 80s, and the others will have it cut strait and super short and dyed a hot pink. I guess it takes a lot of barbers/stylists to keep these trends going.
I also pass a guitar store on my way to school. They have a tiny room that is open to the street, and since I am interested in trying to keep up my bass lessons I was taking in America, I wandered inside. There I met a kid with decent English who asked me to call him Slash. “You know”, he said, “From Guns and Roses?” It was cute. Anyway, I asked about a bass and he said they had some “upstairs” which turned out to mean in a dude’s apartment-turned-store in a building next door. In many places I would have been creeped out being led up the dark staircase in this run-down apartment complex, but in China it seems only natural that that is where you would keep your inventory. They didn’t have many basses to choose from, so I didn’t stay long, but I promised to return with either Sonny or Barrie or both to see about getting a cheap one of what is available. Maybe that’s what I’ll blow my first paycheck on.
I had English Corner tonight, and it was great! It’s just an extra time for anyone who wants to to come and practice their English with a foreigner. I really enjoyed it, though I was a little nervous going into it. I wasn’t sure if I’d prepared enough, but my Chinese counterpart in this venture asked if it would be okay if we kept it informal…she said the students would enjoy that more. This was great for me because it means I never have to prepare for this like I would a normal class. I brought some discussion questions and broke the 60 or so kids into groups to talk about them. Most people wanted to talk with me though, so I tried to float between the groups as best I could while having a crowd also following me the entire time. As an attention whore, this was right up my alley. It was difficult to get everyone to talk because there were some over-exuberate students who really wanted to talk a LOT. I also ended up talking more than I should have because they all kept asking me questions about America or what I thought of Chinese food/education/people/medicine. Next time I’ll have to figure out a way to get them to do most of the talking…not that I don’t enjoy it.
I’m supposed to get internet installed in the house tomorrow, but we’ll see if it actually materializes. This being China, The Land of False Promise, I imagine it will indeed be installed tomorrow, but in a location like the kitchen or the bathroom. But with any luck I’ll be able to modify it into working with prayer and chewing gum, so I hope to post this and some video soon. For now I’m off to sleep…I want to be awake when they come to the house tomorrow, if indeed they actually show up.
Update 9/14/07
Surprise! They did come yesterday morning after all, but as I expected, all was not quite perfect. They’ve never seen a Mac computer before, and so they couldn’t figure out how to magic their crazy Chinese network into my machine. Luckily I half-anticipated this problem (or problems like it) and brought my old lap-top also. Many thanks to Bill Sybolt for fixing it before I came. Though it’s slow, the interwebs work fine through it, and so I’ll be able to start making some semi-regular posts online. The videos and pictures might have to wait a moment longer until I find the best outlet for those, but Livejournal.com will work well enough for this sort of thing. By the way, it took four Chinese men to install the internet into my apartment, and by “install” I mean plug a pre-existing cable into the back of my computer and type in an IP address into the correct field. China is big on standing around and watching. It was also at this time that I was language-raped. This is the common term among foreign teachers to refer to a situation in which you are tricked into giving an English lesson for free. Mr. Wang had come to supervise the installation of the internet in the apartment, and with him he brought two students and had me talk to them for almost an hour. At points like that it’s tough to come up with a reason to say no or get out of it. He knew at that point I had nothing else going on, so a good stand-by lie was out of the question. Fortunately I convinced him that I had to meet Barrie to talk about classes, and that I was going to meet her for lunch. It was my bid to escape.
So my landlord took Barrie and I out to lunch with two students he is trying to make us teach. It seems Mr. Wang will do anything to make us feel indebted to him so that we’ll teach more of his students. This lunch rides a fine line too…he was doing us a favor by feeding us, and supposedly it was a “welcome to China” meal for me. But, at the same time, he was helping out these students he knows…using the lunch as an excuse to make them talk to us and practice English. So Barrie and I talked it out, and we feel that it was a larger favor for the students, and thus they owe him for this one, not we. It’s a complicated system. The lunch was actually in a cool place. Mr. Wang knows everyone. He’s like a lesser mafia Don. So we went to a restaurant that a friend of his knows. The cool part is that the restaurant is in the middle of nowhere, and all around the place they grow their own food and raise the animals they use. Everything you order was grown right there…as we pulled up we saw a young man bringing in a bowl of greens from out in the field somewhere. All the food was delicious, including the deer-bone soup. We would have had a course of wild pig (hunted, presumably, in the nearby woods) but we were full at that point and refused.
We returned home just in time for me to get to my class for the day, which went quite well. Nothing else of note happened yesterday.
TODAY, however, started out with a bang. Barrie and Andrea’s school had a sort of mini-Olympics at the school today. I got up early to go and film it, because they had decided that the foreign teachers should go and march in the parade around the enormous stadium with all the other student groups and athletes. They even gave them matching jumpsuits and sneakers. I got there just as they were about to begin and Mr. Wang (he’s everywhere!) grabbed me, thrust a small Chinese flag in my hand, and said I was in the parade. So I marched with everyone around stadium in front of thousands of kids, their parents, and a ton of visiting dignitaries. I broke off from the main crowd about halfway around the track and videotaped the rest of the proceedings, much to the delight of the nearest group of Chinese students. I videoed them too, which made them all go nuts, and repeated that process with each group as I walked around the track. As a foreigner, I can go places that a Chinese person would be stopped or at least questioned for going, and I just walked around the track like I owned it videoing everything that was going on. I had to leave to teach a class, which sucked because Barrie and Andrea did their step routine in front of the crowd not long after I left. I’ve got a video of it from another source, but it’s not all that great. I’ll work on getting all this together over the weekend and maybe I can have it up for you to see.
My class today was my first time with the Sophomores, though I had seen most of them on Wednesday at English Corner. The class rocked, and was easy because it was the same introductory class I’d already done three times before. I’ll get to use it one more time when the Juniors start later in the term, but otherwise I’ve got to start coming up with some new lesson plans. That’s a project for tomorrow.
I signed my contract officially today, which feels good. I’m required to take a physical here before I can get my “Foreign Expert” book and my permanent visa. Also the contract was for a little more money than they’d originally said, so that was nice. All the administration I have to deal with are very nice and at least make a show of wanting to be helpful. Oh, and my school has an evaluation coming up on China’s National Holiday which for some reason means we don’t get the normal one-week break like everyone else. But to make up for that some time in the middle of October we’re taking TWO WEEKS off. I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do with myself. During that time everyone else I know is working, so there won’t be any traveling or anything. I guess I’ll be painting a lot of Warhammer models. Oh, and Houston and John! I’ll be posting some pictures up for you to see of my finished projects as soon as I can so you may judge them.
This weekend I don’t have anything specific going on except planning for next week’s classes. Will post events as they occur.
Hello everyone from the China!
I’ve been here for five days now. I’m writing from my apartment, but I don’t have internet yet so I’ll have to take this down to my friends’ apartment and upload it from one of their machines. I hope to achieve internet full interwebs functionality over the course of the next week. My landlord has suggested I simply run a cable from a nearby internet café. We’ll see how that works out.
I’ll try to post at semi-regular intervals, and when I eventually get a connection here at the house I’ll hopefully be posting some videos I’ve been taking. In the meantime, here are some names that would be likely to come up often in these posts:
The Cast
Barrie
Barrie is a friend of mine from Berry College. We started the Potato Bandits together with a select few others, and were roommates for several years. She can usually get me to do things that I want to do, but otherwise would not have the guts to attempt. Hence, China. She moved here four years ago following another college friend of ours, Wes. Wes has since moved on to teach and go to school in Shanghai, but I’m sure we’ll be hearing from him again. Barrie has taught at her current school three years. She is the girlfriend of Sonny. Barrie does a poor impression of a snake.
Sonny
Sonny is a Chinese man who grew up in Inner Mongolia. He studies at a local university, and is a semester away from graduating. Chinese schools at this level are ridiculously competitive. To get into his current program, he was one of three students in his entire college to pass the required exam. He’s a smart cookie. His goal is to teach English in Japan along with Barrie, whom he has been dating for almost two years. His English fluency is great, and he has been instrumental in helping me run around Changchun fetching the items I need to set up my house. Sonny does a great impression of a snake.
Andrea/Gretchen
Andrea went to school with Barrie and I, and the three of us performed in the college improv troupe, Easy Baked Improv, together. Gretchen is fluent in German, and has lived in Germany studying at intervals. Because of her affinity with the country and language, (and because she is blond and blue-eyed) at some point early in our relationship she garnered the moniker “Gretchen”. These names will be used interchangeably without warning. Keep up.
Mr. Wang
An administrator of some sort in the school Barrie and Andrea teach in, he is the owner of the apartment I am currently leasing. Apparently China works like this: If I do you a favor, then you will do me a favor. Then, because of the favor you just did me, I will do something for you. Now you owe me. It is because of this cyclical pattern of suspect altruism that I have this house. Barrie at some point did a job for Mr. Wang, and now he has kindly allowed me to rent this amazing place for much cheaper than he would normally have rented it. Now it seems we are beholden to him…and he keeps doing us favors which makes us all really nervous. We are already promised to teach extra classes for him. If he takes us out to lunch one more time, we might technically count as his property under China law.
The Set
ChangChun
Nestled comfortably in the middle of the Jilin Province, Changchun is located in the north-east of China. It’s a 12 hour train ride down to Beijing (or 8 hours on the fancy and super expensive new speed train) and about the same up to the border of Mongolia. It’s a pretty large city, which I would ignorantly put on par with Macon in size. Maybe. Except with a bajillion people. Seriously. And that’s just in the apartment I live in. Changchun boasts a 24 hour McDonalds and (for some reason) about 6 KFCs. These restaurants are strangely enough some of the most expensive around, so you save going to these places for the truly special events. Your anniversary, for example.
Edit. I have learned today that Changchun has about 6.5 million people in it. This is roughly equivalent to a bajillion, so my original assertion was correct.
We all live extremely close to each other. I can look out of my sixth-story window and easily see Barrie and Andrea’s campus right down the road. It takes less than ten minutes for me to walk from my door to their apartment on campus. Sonny’s school is similarly close, and he often bikes from his campus to here in about ten minutes or so. In between all these locations are a thousand small places to eat on the street, along with all the other small businesses you could think of. I have an internet café and a small grocery in the first floor of my building, and three places to get haircuts within a stone’s throw of my door. So far despite its much talked-about size, China seems conveniently located.
As mentioned before, my apartment is pretty amazing. Two floors connected with a steep metal staircase, two bathrooms, two huge living-room-esque areas, and several bedrooms. Clearly this is meant for either families or for groups of roommates. I’ve spent about a third of my set-up cash so far getting normal supplies for the house (food, sheets, cleaning materials, school supplies, etc.) Big purchases have been limited to a stovetop that works with the gas in the building, and maybe later a microwave if I can get one cheap. I’m pretty excited about how all this is shaping up. I’ll be ready for you guys all to visit by the end of next week or so.
Update 7/10/07
I start classes tomorrow. I’m a shade terrified still, but only a shade. Specifically vermilion. I have a pretty nice schedule, with Tuesday being the only really intense day. It falls like this: I have no classes Monday, three on Tuesday, and then one class each on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I’ll also be in charge of the schools “English corner” once a week. That’s basically their version of English club. So really my week will stay pretty clear until Mr. Wang tells us that his class are ready to start also. Which reminds me:
MR. WANG UPDATE.
Barrie and I went to Mr. Wang’s office today to ask about the classes. We had assumed they would start today like most of the other classes at area schools, but we were told it might be another week or two before these special classes would be organized. Then he told us what these classes were going to focus on. Apparently a group of graduate students are preparing for a trip to study in Italy. We are supposed to help them get ready for this trip because the students are afraid they won’t understand the European/Western ways of education in general and the Italian accent specifically. So it all boils down to the fact that we are the closest things to Italians that they have available…clearly we’ll have a working knowledge of the Italian state! So we’ve already started doing some research, by which I mean finding websites that highlight foreign accents and laughing at them. I have a feeling we are more than qualified for this job.
END UPDATE
I had an adventure last night involving trying to produce hot water. Not something you would imagine to be a difficult task, right? My house has come equipped with about seventeen different ways to heat water. But remember, China is the Land of False Promise! So each of these seventeen ways is missing a (usually) small but critical element…each seeming so simple…yet each tantalizingly just out of reach. All this has boiled down to some pretty cold showers in the mornings, so I took it upon myself to invest in a water heating coil that is designed to fit down inside a gigantic thermos that I also invested in. It seems like a pretty self-explanatory process. You fill the thermos with water, and put the coil in and it gets hot. Well, somewhere in this one-step process I failed to follow some unwritten China-physics rule, and when I plugged in my heating coil, the electric plug exploded in a cloud of acrid black smoke. I was left in a momentary state of shock, with my entire hand blackened from the loud POWF! But otherwise I was left unhurt. I had to keep feeling my hand around the black areas for a moment…it sure seemed like I should be feeling pain somewhere…I was shaken enough to think maybe I was hurting but I just couldn’t feel it yet. Then I noticed that not only had the cable literally torn itself in half, but the wall socket it was plugged into wasn’t working anymore. This is still the case, which sucks because it’s the only electric outlet in the kitchen and it’s the one the fridge was plugged into. Now I’m pretty wary of most Chinese meat products as it is, and I wasn’t interested in seeing what sort of crime against nature is produced when these products go bad. So I frantically pulled all the extension cables available to me into a giant pile and eventually was able to finagle power from across the room. The sausage/meat-tubes were saved! Now I can mix them with eggs in the morning! Yay?
The good news from today is that I was able to get my stove working finally, so I was able to cook for the first time since moving in. I feel pretty good about my ability to make the foods in China. I have found several foodstuffs here I thought I’d have to go without: peanut butter and jelly, hot dogs (sort of), mustard, pickles, cheese, etc. Most of these are ridiculously expensive by comparison to their more Chinese-ish counterparts sitting next to them on the shelves, but I’ll happily pay the difference for a good sharp cheddar. Now I’ll just need to find some half-decent potato chips and it’ll be like my diet from home never changed. Good thing too…the last thing I wanted when I took this teaching job in China was to have to experience new things.
Update 9/11/07
Today was a day of successes! Plural! Not only did I manage to cook eggs with my new stove without burning them, but my class at eight this morning was awesome! I’ll preface all this by saying I stole almost everything directly from watching Barrie and Andrea teach the day before. I had freshmen in my first class, and I really had them right from the start. I knew if I was quiet at the beginning it would be tough to get them later, so I came in loud and stayed that way till the end of class. Actually I got there this morning a little early and put my stuff in the room. There was already a full class inside with a few kids messing around with the audio-visual equipment. They looked like they knew what they were doing, to the point where I questioned whether or not I had the right room…maybe some other teacher had instructed them to play music and surf the web on the big screen? After I put my stuff down I left, waited in the hall until my watch said it was about time, and came in the back. In the very back of the class there was one guy sleeping. Everyone else was up front as far as they could go, but he was sort of hiding. So I made a point of standing behind him and waiting until the tittering of the other students made him look up. He slowly turned around and jumped when he saw me. It was great, and I had the other students after that. I started every class today the same way. When you ask a Chinese student “How are you?” they will ALWAYS respond with “Fine, thank you, and you?”. It’s the response that is in every textbook and they’ve been learning it since they were young. So before I even introduced myself I wrote this phrase on the board and said I never wanted to hear it again in class. That I would be asking how they were every day, and every day they’d better tell me something besides “fine”. I practiced with them by coming in the door loudly several times and always demanding different answers. THEN I introduced myself, and we went forward. I ran out of stuff about half way through, so I made up a few activities on the fly to fill time. One example of a time-waster project was I had them all write five things about themselves on a piece of paper, and then split them into groups to come up with questions of things they’d like to know about me. Then we sort of had a question and answer session back and forth. It worked really well, and I didn’t have to stall but for about three minutes at the end waiting for the bell.
This process repeated basically along the same lines for the other two classes too. The differences were in my 1:30 class of seniors their level of English proficiency was way beyond what I’d expected, so we went through the material even faster, so we ended up using some pretty complex discussion questions that I had brought (ex. Who lies more, men or women? Why do you think so?) All of them were controversial in some form or another, so I broke them into groups and wandered discussing these things with them. The Post-Graduate class at 3:30 was the toughest. The class only has 4 people in it, all of them doctors and all of them with very poor English. But then my boss allowed some English majors to join in, so I had two hard extremes to work with. It took a while to find a balance, and even at the end it was tough not to have either the doctors frustrated or the English majors bored. Everyone seemed low energy anyway, so I ended up not using some of the other games that went over well before, and just sat them down and we talked. I see this group 2 times a week, and I’m not excited about it. I’m really happy how every class went, but I’m just not sure how to handle this group. The doctors are only taking English because they are required to pass and English proficiency exam before they can proceed with their study. I’m sure I’ll figure out something.
Tomorrow I will normally have a class, but for some reason it doesn’t start until a few weeks after the others do. So I’m free tomorrow all day until my school’s English club meets at 6:30. They have told me I can run it for as long as I want, but I am planning on about an hour and half, or until all the students get bored. I’m not sure what I’m going to do for it. I don’t know yet how much is my initiative and how much student input there will be. I might just do discussion questions again, and maybe some English-related game that I steal directly from some website or another. More on this later.
Update 9/12/07
My school is a brisk 20 minute walk from my house, going what I have been assured by my students must be the absolute longest route possible. One of them has kindly offered to show me their secret short cut, so soon I might be able to sleep that much later in the mornings. As positive as that might sound, I sort of like my path as it is. I get to pass through several centers of activity, and at one point cut through a narrow shanty-town-esque market street that I have found myself mentally referring to as Diagon Alley. As I dodge chickens and half-naked toddlers, I also have to bend in half to duck under the tarps that hang over the path. They are there to keep the sun and rain off the produce and people, but for some reason they thought it was okay to hang them about five feet off the ground. That’s cool if you’re the average China-person, but for me that doesn’t quite cut it. I don’t mind the ducking, and the locals get a kick out of it every day both coming and going. I also pass about a hundred places for people to get their hair cut, which I guess makes sense…Chinese boys and men keep their hair cut to state regulation with nearly no exception. Girl’s hair is like a radio station…the best hits of yesterday and today. There will be a group of girls on the sidewalk, and some will have the giant poof hair that was only just barely acceptable in the 80s, and the others will have it cut strait and super short and dyed a hot pink. I guess it takes a lot of barbers/stylists to keep these trends going.
I also pass a guitar store on my way to school. They have a tiny room that is open to the street, and since I am interested in trying to keep up my bass lessons I was taking in America, I wandered inside. There I met a kid with decent English who asked me to call him Slash. “You know”, he said, “From Guns and Roses?” It was cute. Anyway, I asked about a bass and he said they had some “upstairs” which turned out to mean in a dude’s apartment-turned-store in a building next door. In many places I would have been creeped out being led up the dark staircase in this run-down apartment complex, but in China it seems only natural that that is where you would keep your inventory. They didn’t have many basses to choose from, so I didn’t stay long, but I promised to return with either Sonny or Barrie or both to see about getting a cheap one of what is available. Maybe that’s what I’ll blow my first paycheck on.
I had English Corner tonight, and it was great! It’s just an extra time for anyone who wants to to come and practice their English with a foreigner. I really enjoyed it, though I was a little nervous going into it. I wasn’t sure if I’d prepared enough, but my Chinese counterpart in this venture asked if it would be okay if we kept it informal…she said the students would enjoy that more. This was great for me because it means I never have to prepare for this like I would a normal class. I brought some discussion questions and broke the 60 or so kids into groups to talk about them. Most people wanted to talk with me though, so I tried to float between the groups as best I could while having a crowd also following me the entire time. As an attention whore, this was right up my alley. It was difficult to get everyone to talk because there were some over-exuberate students who really wanted to talk a LOT. I also ended up talking more than I should have because they all kept asking me questions about America or what I thought of Chinese food/education/people/medicine. Next time I’ll have to figure out a way to get them to do most of the talking…not that I don’t enjoy it.
I’m supposed to get internet installed in the house tomorrow, but we’ll see if it actually materializes. This being China, The Land of False Promise, I imagine it will indeed be installed tomorrow, but in a location like the kitchen or the bathroom. But with any luck I’ll be able to modify it into working with prayer and chewing gum, so I hope to post this and some video soon. For now I’m off to sleep…I want to be awake when they come to the house tomorrow, if indeed they actually show up.
Update 9/14/07
Surprise! They did come yesterday morning after all, but as I expected, all was not quite perfect. They’ve never seen a Mac computer before, and so they couldn’t figure out how to magic their crazy Chinese network into my machine. Luckily I half-anticipated this problem (or problems like it) and brought my old lap-top also. Many thanks to Bill Sybolt for fixing it before I came. Though it’s slow, the interwebs work fine through it, and so I’ll be able to start making some semi-regular posts online. The videos and pictures might have to wait a moment longer until I find the best outlet for those, but Livejournal.com will work well enough for this sort of thing. By the way, it took four Chinese men to install the internet into my apartment, and by “install” I mean plug a pre-existing cable into the back of my computer and type in an IP address into the correct field. China is big on standing around and watching. It was also at this time that I was language-raped. This is the common term among foreign teachers to refer to a situation in which you are tricked into giving an English lesson for free. Mr. Wang had come to supervise the installation of the internet in the apartment, and with him he brought two students and had me talk to them for almost an hour. At points like that it’s tough to come up with a reason to say no or get out of it. He knew at that point I had nothing else going on, so a good stand-by lie was out of the question. Fortunately I convinced him that I had to meet Barrie to talk about classes, and that I was going to meet her for lunch. It was my bid to escape.
So my landlord took Barrie and I out to lunch with two students he is trying to make us teach. It seems Mr. Wang will do anything to make us feel indebted to him so that we’ll teach more of his students. This lunch rides a fine line too…he was doing us a favor by feeding us, and supposedly it was a “welcome to China” meal for me. But, at the same time, he was helping out these students he knows…using the lunch as an excuse to make them talk to us and practice English. So Barrie and I talked it out, and we feel that it was a larger favor for the students, and thus they owe him for this one, not we. It’s a complicated system. The lunch was actually in a cool place. Mr. Wang knows everyone. He’s like a lesser mafia Don. So we went to a restaurant that a friend of his knows. The cool part is that the restaurant is in the middle of nowhere, and all around the place they grow their own food and raise the animals they use. Everything you order was grown right there…as we pulled up we saw a young man bringing in a bowl of greens from out in the field somewhere. All the food was delicious, including the deer-bone soup. We would have had a course of wild pig (hunted, presumably, in the nearby woods) but we were full at that point and refused.
We returned home just in time for me to get to my class for the day, which went quite well. Nothing else of note happened yesterday.
TODAY, however, started out with a bang. Barrie and Andrea’s school had a sort of mini-Olympics at the school today. I got up early to go and film it, because they had decided that the foreign teachers should go and march in the parade around the enormous stadium with all the other student groups and athletes. They even gave them matching jumpsuits and sneakers. I got there just as they were about to begin and Mr. Wang (he’s everywhere!) grabbed me, thrust a small Chinese flag in my hand, and said I was in the parade. So I marched with everyone around stadium in front of thousands of kids, their parents, and a ton of visiting dignitaries. I broke off from the main crowd about halfway around the track and videotaped the rest of the proceedings, much to the delight of the nearest group of Chinese students. I videoed them too, which made them all go nuts, and repeated that process with each group as I walked around the track. As a foreigner, I can go places that a Chinese person would be stopped or at least questioned for going, and I just walked around the track like I owned it videoing everything that was going on. I had to leave to teach a class, which sucked because Barrie and Andrea did their step routine in front of the crowd not long after I left. I’ve got a video of it from another source, but it’s not all that great. I’ll work on getting all this together over the weekend and maybe I can have it up for you to see.
My class today was my first time with the Sophomores, though I had seen most of them on Wednesday at English Corner. The class rocked, and was easy because it was the same introductory class I’d already done three times before. I’ll get to use it one more time when the Juniors start later in the term, but otherwise I’ve got to start coming up with some new lesson plans. That’s a project for tomorrow.
I signed my contract officially today, which feels good. I’m required to take a physical here before I can get my “Foreign Expert” book and my permanent visa. Also the contract was for a little more money than they’d originally said, so that was nice. All the administration I have to deal with are very nice and at least make a show of wanting to be helpful. Oh, and my school has an evaluation coming up on China’s National Holiday which for some reason means we don’t get the normal one-week break like everyone else. But to make up for that some time in the middle of October we’re taking TWO WEEKS off. I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do with myself. During that time everyone else I know is working, so there won’t be any traveling or anything. I guess I’ll be painting a lot of Warhammer models. Oh, and Houston and John! I’ll be posting some pictures up for you to see of my finished projects as soon as I can so you may judge them.
This weekend I don’t have anything specific going on except planning for next week’s classes. Will post events as they occur.