Smite Smote Smitten

Peekchoors.

2008-07-07T05:05:00.011-06:00

Roughly chronological, except where they're out of order.

Pingyao, where we were way back ages ago, still had red lanterns.

Sneaky photography during Wild Jujubes, the dance performance.

Songshan, the top of which we did not quite reach.

The countryside around Guoliang Cun, and the slide on which we... slid.... down the mountain.

(misplaced picture from Songshan)

The back of the 1 RMB bill features an image of lanterns in West Lake, in Hangzhou. Katrina was dismayed to discover that artistic license had been taken with their locations, and she couldn't recreate the picture in a photograph.

Huangshan was gorgeous.

By the time we made it down, Katrina had gotten a little loopy.

But in the end, I think Yangshuo may have been my favorite place we visited.

(A Jia, our rock climbing guide)

For the Fourth of July, we were in Beijing and we found a TGIFridays, which we enjoyed immensely.

Especially the salad.

Hangzhou

2008-06-17T18:52:00.002-06:00

I have the foggy idea that Marco Polo may have described Hangzhou as the loveliest city in Asia, though I can't say for sure if the idea originates with a reputable source. From what I can tell so far, the city is a wet one-- it has been raining since sometime the night before last and the air is hot and damp (I've invested in an umbrella, something that I never entirely saw the point of in Oregon, where it is rarely both hot and raining and the same time). Yesterday we walked around the West Lake (one of thirty-two or so West Lakes in China, but this is the famous one) and a pedestrian commercial district (pedestrian like "people traveling by foot," not like "unimaginative"). The lake seems like it must be very pretty, but it was so misty yesterday that we couldn't really see much of it (the mist was also pretty in its own right). Today, we might take a bus out to a Song Dynasty kiln where you can make your own pottery (Katrina will blow the other tourists out of the water with her mad pottery skillz) and a village where they grow China's famous Dragon Well tea.

Suzhou, the Venice of the Orient

2008-06-17T18:22:00.002-06:00

Suzhou, city of gardens and canals, gets a somewhat lukewarm description from the Lonely Planet as a mostly fairly typical modern Chinese city-- nice enough, but Hangzhou is better, apparently. We came to Suzhou early early in the morning armed with names and approximate locations for a few hostels, and we spent most of our time walking the city; when we were awake and happy and well-fed in an attractive part of town, it was rather pleasant, but when we were tired and hot and our feet hurt walking alongside perfectly unremarkable tile-covered convenience stores and clothing shops, it was less enjoyable.

Suzhou is famous for its canals (the city became prosperous as a trade city on the Grand Canal) and its gardens, and while we visited both (and they were nice), what I'll remember Suzhou for is the food we ate. Lunch on our second day town was at Mario's Ristorante, run by what seemed to be a real, live Italian person (his name may even actually be Mario). The restaurant was expensive but not crazy and definitely worth it; we ate real pasta and real cheese and the pesto that I ordered was fantastic (I will never admit it to the students in Fenyang, but when I told them that noodles were among my favorite foods, I was thinking at least as much of pesto and parmesan as zhajiang mian and kaolaolao), easily and absolutely the best Western food we've eaten since Thanksgiving. For dinner, we went to an Indian restaurant near our hostel, and on our last day in Suzhou, we ate tasty Xinjiang-style food.

From Suzhou, we planned to head to Hangzhou via a night boat down the Grand Canal, but, alas, the passenger boat service appears to have been discontinued, and we had to take a bus instead. Sigh. More on Hangzhou later.

I'll post some pictures another day

2008-06-11T05:16:00.003-06:00

(this post (this will probably interest no one) is being typed on an Eee PC (the old version, not the new one with the nicer screen (too hard to find and probably too much more expensive, in the end)), which after months of lusting after, I finally bought last week; it is tiny and portable and perfect to be useful while traveling, and the keyboard, though small, is pretty much fine for my hands, except for that dumb right shift key being in the wrong place)

Continuing our streak of always getting sick just when we ought to be leaving for vacation, Katrina caught a cold the day before she and I originally planned to leave Fenyang. Even if she hadn't, we probably wouldn't've left on time; we still had a lot of cleaning and packing to do. We bummed around town for a couple days and packed and tried to hide in our apartment so no one would realize that we hadn't left yet.

On Tuesday(?), we left. We decided that we'd spent enough time in Taiyuan already, and it isn't the most attractive city, so we decided to begin our southward journey by going to Pingyao. Pingyao was very nice-- familiar from our last visit, but not as familiar as Fenyang. We stayed at Harmony Guesthouse, where the owners are very helpful and the cheapest room is pretty darned cheap (much cheaper than the place we stayed in the fall, though possibly less cool and lacking in cat), and we spent a lot of time in the hostel sleeping and recovering. We also went out to see a dance performance, Wild Jujubes, which I really liked.

After Pingyao, we headed for Luoyang by night train. The train was really cool; my other experience with trains in China had been not entirely pleasant (though not really unpleasant, either), and our train wasn't even leaving Pingyao until about 1 am, so I did not have high hopes. The bunks were really comfortable and the car seemed (relatively) spacious; they only sold as many tickets as there were beds, so it wasn't so crowded. In Luoyang, we evaded a quite persistent woman who wanted us to come stay at a hostel she knew (she followed us to a restaurant, waited outside while we ate lunch, then ambushed us when we were finished and tried to tell us that the bus we wanted wasn't running that day and we needed to find a place to stay (untrue)) and took a bus to Dengfeng.

Most people probably go to Dengfeng to see the Shaolin Temple and the warrior monks; we spent some time watching students at one of the many local martial arts schools practicing outside, but what was most exciting to us were the mountains. The mountains are just like in Chinese landscape paintings; they are beautiful. We spent most of a day exploring the geopark area. The first mountain we tried to climb, we went up and up and up and there were lots of stairs and a wide stone path and then we got to a large rock with these characters painted on it: 游客止步. Tourists, stop walking. It was like we climbed three-quarters of the way up the mountain just to get to a big “Dead End” sign. There were still footpaths leading up, and we followed them for a while, but in the end, we decided that we wouldn't be able to get to the top and we weren't sure where we would find ourselves if we did follow the path, and we headed back down to find another mountain.

The second mountain was actually the one we were aiming for the whole time. It started with an expensive ticket for a cable car to the halfway point, the longest cable car in China (taking a cable car felt like cheating, but we didn't have much time; we needed to be back at our hotel by seven to pick up tickets to a show we wanted to see at eight) and continued with a path that the Lonely Planet says “hugs the cliff” (p 461); that description is pretty accurate. The path is built of concrete and supported by concrete beams leaning into the mountain and under the path there is a whole lot of air before there's any more mountain. It's... a little freaky.

We climbed up and up and up again and finally got to the point that we decided was our goal (we didn't have time to make it to the top and still get back down by seven, we thought); the Rope Bridge. It's a scary scary bridge (scary mostly because in every movie, a board breaks under the foot of the brave protagonist). We crossed the bridge, took some pictures, crossed back, and tried to book it back to the cable car. “If you want to take the cable car down, you'd better hurry,” called a woman as we passed, “They're going to turn it off soon. And by the way, would you like to stop and buy some water?” As we panted up the last few steps, though, the reassuring sound of the motor running the cars came to a halt, and when we huffed and puffed our way to the door, the guys manning the station shook their heads, said they were closed, and pointed (very helpfully) to the stairs down. It was not our happiest moment of the trip.

We pretty much ran down all of the stairs to get to the bottom in time (which is why we're pretty much hobbling up and down any incline planes we happen to encounter now), but a couple of expensive taxi rides later, we had made it back to the hotel, picked up our tickets, and arrived at the venue just in time to see the beginning of the show. The show we were watching was the Shaolin Monks' Zen Music Grand Ritual, and it was... pretty good. I think Katrina enjoyed it more than I did; I got hung up for a long time on trying to decide if the music was live or recorded and it distracted me from enjoying the dancing and wu shu. In the end, I think it was prerecorded, which is too bad, but it was beautiful music and the setting for the show is gorgeous-- it's an outdoor theater with mountains rising up in the background (the mountains actually have lights set up on the ridgelines that are used in the show). I'm glad we saw it, but I wish it had been a little less expensive.

For the last couple days, we've been in a small village called Guoliangcun. It's a pain to get here; it involved a train, multiple buses, and (in the end) a taxi, but we had heard that it was worth the effort, and what we heard was correct. The village is in the middle of a national park. The taxi we rode in with drove through a long tunnel carved by hand by 12 villagers from 1972 to 1977 called (at least on the local signs; the guidebook gives it a different name) the Long Precipice Tunnel; the cliff just falls away from it and it's very dramatic. Prior to the building of that tunnel, apparently the only way into or out of the village was a loong staircase called the Sky Ladder (unfortunately currently closed). There are well-maintained pathways to hit some scenic highlights in the area, and the scenic highlights are gorgeous. It's misty and mountainy and very, very green. We didn't do a lot of exploring beyond the marked paths (our legs are still tired from the other mountains), but we saw pretty much everything that's marked and open. A few sights are closed right now; we briefly thought about trying to sneak into the Red Dragon Cave to see what it was like, but decided in the end that if even the Chinese government thought it was too dangerous to let tourists in, we didn't want to mess with it (the path is littered with signs saying things like “Caution: this area is extremely dangerous, move along quickly”). One thing that we got to see and do here that neither of us had ever seen before was a slide. It's a stone slide that starts pretty high up on the mountain and goes to the bottom; it's enclosed a little bit to keep out weather and debris, and it costs about two dollars a person. After you pay, the man at the top gives you a pair of pants with a reinforced butt and some sleevies to protect your arms. You can control your velocity with your arms and legs, but gee whiz was it fun. We almost wanted to climb all the way back up the mountain so we could do it a second time.

Mm, that's all for now. Tomorrow, we're going to head on to Suzhou to see silk and gardens and canals and things. It should be a good time. :)

Springtime

2008-05-29T18:40:00.013-06:00

So! It's been an eventful while since the last time I posted.

In April, we had a short vacation. The students all had their mid-term exams, so we didn't have classes for a week, and we decided to take the opportunity to see some famous Shanxi sights.

We went first to Wutaishan, a holy Buddhist mountainy area. There's a small town in a valley (it costs Y120 or so to enter the valley) with probably 7 temples for every person (I am exaggerating). We were pretty excited about the mountains, which were beautiful, and the first day (a day on which my camera was unfortunately batteryless) we walked up into the hills and had a fantastic view of everything. The hills are criss-crossed with lines of Tibetan prayer flags, some still bright and others faded past the point of color, and they flutter and flap and roar in the wind.

The afternoon of the first day, it started snowing, so we stopped climbing the hills so much and went to see some temples.

Each lock is a wish for peace or love, we've been told (also, most of the locks say are inscribed with either "peace" or "love," which was a pretty good hint). People climb to high or holy places and leave their wishes there.

It kept snowing for a while; we actually got pretty worried that we wouldn't be able to get out of the city (at least not headed north, which is where we wanted to go). In the end, it was no problem; the bus put on chains and we maybe drove a little more slowly than we otherwise might have.

There was a pretty spectacular traffic jam on the way north. Impatient trucks kept switching lanes (on a two-lane highway) to try to maneuver around the line ahead of them, which was… unhelpful.

We went to Datong, famous for coal and pollution and ancient things, where we evaded a too-helpful woman who wanted to help us find a hotel (but tried to walk us past the hotel that we told her we wanted to go to) and booked ourselves on a tour to visit the ancient places that were significantly outside of town.

The Hanging Monastery is pretty much what it sounds like, a monastery hanging on the side of a cliff. According to our tour guide, villagers built it as a temple to the Buddha in the hope that he would stop the floods that periodically ruined the village. The floods continued, and over the years, the villagers added Laozi and Confucius to the temple, figuring that the more god-like people they had on their side, the better. Sometime in the more recent past, the government built a large dam, and now there are no more floods. The tour was actually pretty depressing; in practically every room we visited, the guide would say things like, "And these statues of the Buddha are not original; the originals were stolen during the Cultural Revolution" or "And look at the little Buddhas' heads. They have no faces; this is because soldiers broke the Buddhas' faces during the Cultural Revolution."

On the same tour, we visited Yungang Grottoes, a series of caves with carven Buddhas ranging from very very big to pretty darned small.

After we got back, we did more things, though apparently not things that I really took pictures of (Katrina takes pictures of everything, so I tend to feel like I don't need to as much). We've taught lots of classes and visited some students' homes. We puppysat for a few days and Mr. Ren and Gao-laoshi taught us how to make many many noodles. Lately, things have been winding down-- we're leaving Fenyang on Sunday-- and we've been trying to take everybody out to lunch or dinner to thank them for being so kind to us. This week was the last week, so we took lots of pictures of and with students.

A representative few of the pictures-- the students are crammed into the rooms but still mostly friendly (those whole-class pictures are from grade 1, though, and the first-year classes are pretty much all happier and more cheerful than the second- and third-years). I'm not sure what exactly is going on with that cucumber in the third picture; I'd been playing cards with those girls, and they put the cucumber in every picture we took. :)

The games class (one of my activity classes this term) minus one girl who couldn't come on Wednesday, and

the gentlemen of the games class. I loved this class; it was my favorite. It's an activity class, and it was definitely the lowest-prestige option for an activity class-- the first week, there were only six students sitting together playing Scrabble (everyone wanted to take TOEFL class). We had some fun, though, and in the end there were nine students, which is only a gain of three, but on the other hand, it's a gain of three! That's half again what we were when we started. They were enormously, amazingly, fantastically willing to try very hard at anything I came in and told them was a game. They were always friendly, always smiling, always helping each other. Wheee, them.

And now we're done with teaching. There's a farewell meeting this afternoon, and a party tomorrow with what members of the elementary school classes are able to show up (when Gao-laoshi told them that class would be on Saturday afternoon instead of Sunday morning this week, there was an immediate chorus of "Bu xing!" ("Noooooooooo!").

Katrina and I are going to travel in China for about a month, and then she'll go on to Europe and I'll come for a while. I'll be flying in to Oregon on July 8, where I hope to see many people. Sometime in the middle or end of August, I'll be moving out to Madison, though, so I'll only be home for a little more than a month, I think.

Earthquake

2008-05-12T17:16:00.001-06:00

Hi guys.
We felt the earthquake - I wanted to dive under a desk like we always practiced in drills at Eastwood - but it wasn't very strong here and we're all fine.

<3,
Joanna

A Selection of Pictures from our Spring Festival Vacation

2008-04-06T02:40:00.044-06:00

We had about a month off for Spring Festival, so we used the time to travel. Katrina's cousin Chance, flew out to visit us, and the three of us spent a couple weeks in Beijing, Qingdao, Tai Shan, and Fenyang.

Chatotoro in front of St. Somebody's Cathedral on Wangfujing, a shopping street in Beijing.

Hey! We're in a city!

Katrina doing her photographer thing at an aquarium in Beijing.

She's got a thing for tentacles (see her blog for pictures of the dizzying array of things-on-sticks that we could have eaten (I had lamb)).

Look! China!

We picked up Katrina's cousin, Chance, at the airport and the three of us took a bus to Qingdao (home of Tsingtao beer), known as the Bavaria of China. Our bus left Beijing at 5:30 pm, so we thought that maybe it would arrive around 6:00 am and we would have the whole day to explore the city. Instead, we arrived in Qingdao at around 2:30 am and were it not for a very nice young man sitting next to Chance on the bus, we probably would have found ourselves stuck in the cold and the dark for a few hours before we managed to find our hostel.

Katrina and Chance in the revolving viewing station at the top of a hill.

Katrina on top of the hill practicing the xun, a black clay egg-shaped flutey instrument.

Chance is contemplating the city.

Now Chance is contemplating the fish. The Qingdao aquarium was much more impressive than the one we saw in Beijing.

Sunset on the Qingdao beach. We spent a while walking on the sand collecting shells and worn pieces of glass and leaky old batteries.

The view of the city from behind our hostel. The hostel was almost impossible to find; it was on top of observatory hill (it is the site of the first observatory in China), and even with a map, our taxi drivers usually ended up dropping us off at the bottom of the hill because they didn't know how to drive up. The views were excellent, though.

Katrina at the beginning of our trek up Tai Shan, one of the most famous mountains in China.

The view from part way up. It was a foggy, hazy day, so about halfway up we lost sight of the ground. We did eventually get up above the fog, though, and the top of the mountain was pretty clear.

Strong like ox.

Frozen waterfall and carven poetry.

There aren't many pictures of Chance on the mountain. He had all that youthful energy and he kept running up ahead a few hundred steps.

Whoo! Top of the mountain.

After a few days in Fenyang for Spring Festival, we headed back to Beijing to take Chance to the airport. We briefly visited the Great Wall, but it was freezing and windy and packed with people, so we didn't stay long this time.

Katrina says, "I'm so hot in that picture!" She likes her big hair. (the cousins in Tiananmen Square)

The gate of heavenly peace, glowing.

I'm there, too!

Sunshine! Blue sky! Everything in Beijing was much cleaner than anything we had seen in a million years.

Before the gate.

In the Forbidden City. It looks like a photo of architecture, but really it's all about the pigeons.

We never actually knew what we were looking at; this is the gate to something, and plenty of other tourists were taking their pictures there, so we figured it was a good idea.

Pretty.

Oh noes! Eternal loss of beauty!

Although the self-heating meal seemed like an irresistibly good idea before be bought it, in the end it turned out to be gross. Really, really gross.

I'm warming my hands on the steam from the meal.

The back of the Forbidden City.

Candied pineapple on a stick!

Delicious!

We visited a temple where a Spring Festival carnival was winding down. We bought some slightly oversized coins to throw at...

a bell in the center of a much bigger coin. If we rang the bell, we'd get a wish. I never managed to, but Katrina did once (she's since forgotten what she wished for, so I'm going to assume that it came true).

Thanksgiving and its preparation

2007-12-04T16:02:00.000-06:00

Woosh. So. Thanksgiving. We put it off for a week to give ourselves more time to prepare (we're in China; no one noticed). We invited scads of English teachers and also Mr. Ren and Gao-laoshi and Mr. Wang the tai chi instructor. We (where by "we" I mostly mean Katrina and Julie) spent most of the day in the kitchen making wild rice chicken casserole (the only turkeys available were a two-hour bus ride away, cost three hundred kuai, weighed twelve pounds, and probably wouldn't've fit in our oven anyway), broccoli, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, clover-leaf rolls, fruit salad, pumpkin pie, little cupcake-sized apple pies, and stuffing (the pumpkin pie was actually made a couple days earlier). I went out and bought a whole bunch of forks 'cause we only had three or four (we also had to buy about a dozen new plates); when I got to the grocery store that sold forks (kept in a special glass case with the Western-style spoons and the pliers), I couldn't remember how to say "fork" and ended up asking if they had those American things that weren't chopsticks (they didn't quite understand what I meant (I can't imagine why) until I drew a picture). We used every serving dish and every serving utensil and every plate and every fork that we own.

The meal itself was good. The slightly scary teacher who's the head of the English department came and smiled a lot and was completely non-scary (also, Katrina just miraculously made friends with the second year teachers and managed to get Mr. Ren convinced that it would be a good idea to teach them something other than Gao Kao articles, and I am ecstatic). Everyone smiled a lot, and most of them seemed to like the food. Mr. Ren and Gao-laoshi both described it as being very special, which we've decided was probably meant positively. And… yeah. I don't know. It was a nice night. Not quite just like home, but still pretty nice.

More Generosity

2007-12-04T15:59:00.000-06:00

So, more generosity.

Often when we're eating at restaurants, other diners talk about us. At Er You Fan Dian, one of the places we go pretty often, there was a guy who came in for dinner when we were eating. He was there with another man - they were business people, and the first man took a phone call before coming back to sit down. He asked the waitress if we could speak Chinese, and then he asked us how much we would charge to help teach English for his company. We said we couldn't (it's in our contract), and he said something about how ah, we must be helping China to improve her language abilities. We sort of shrugged (we didn't really understand exactly what he was talking about) and he went back to eating. Periodically as he ate, though, he would talk to us - he said that if we ever had any trouble, we should call him - he gave us his phone number and email address and QQ number (QQ is a mostly-Chinese instant messaging service). He said he had a company in Guangzhou (I think; I could be completely wrong). He finished eating and paid the waitress. Then he paid the waitress for our dinner, too. Then he gave each of us a mobile phone card worth 100 kuai. We were… speechless, we were overwhelmed, we were unable to effectively decline (we don't even know how to use the cards). We didn't know how to respond, except to fall in love with everything in China for a while.

Generosity and wushu update

2007-12-04T15:52:00.000-06:00

Soooo when last I wrote, I think I mentioned that I had talked to the nice folks at the sporting goods store, and they were going to help me find a place to learn wushu. So. They did! It was the first in a series of interactions with people where they were so, so generous and welcoming that I sort of fell in love with all of China for a while.

I went back to the store the next day, and Lei Xiao Ming tried to take me to meet the instructor at the school, but unfortunately, he turned out to be in Taiyuan that day. We did visit the school, though - it's not what I was expecting; it's a real school. A primary school, I think, and they study math and English and Chinese and all those subjects, but also wushu and tae kwon do and tai chi. Anyway, he asked where we've been around Fenyang, and I said we've gone to Pingyao and Taiyuan, but also to Lao Ye Shan. He asked if we'd been to Wen Feng Ta, and when I said we hadn't, he offered to take us right then. I was excited and happy and a little bit dumb, and I accepted without remembering that probably we had to teach one more middle school kid that afternoon (but Julie is awfully nice and she covered for me), and he took Katrina and me to Wen Feng Ta, the tallest pagoda in... well, in the area, at least. Mr. Ren said once that it was the tallest in China, but we are skeptical. It was... I dunno. It was excellent. It was fun. It was a really good experience, but I don't think I can really narrate it interestingly. The tower was dark dark dark (no electricity) and on every floor, he used his cell phone to take a photo of us standing next to a statue of a zodiac animal/god.

The next night, we did make it to the actual school. We were... mmm, when we read other Carleton people's descriptions of coming to Fenyang, they talked about feeling like movie stars, and we've kind of felt some of that, but not to the extent that other people have described. At the Yu Ying Xue Xiao, we felt that. The students stood in crowds on the balconies to look at us, and we could hear people everywhere whispering, "waiguoren!" Song Bing, who might or might not be in charge of the school, met us and introduced us to the English teachers, and also he started to teach us more tai chi. Every morning at 6:00, we wake up, and he picks us up at the gates of the school at 6:30. He teaches tai chi for an hour (it's not just us, though there are only a few others who are just starting; part way through class we split into two groups and the others work on the sword form), and shows us videos of someone who is probably the fifth-generation head of the Yang branch of tai chi (or something like that), who has a school now in Seattle and has instructional videos in English, and they feed us breakfast and take us home to start work. They are welcoming and smiling and kind, and they are so willing to teach us that we almost feel awkward because we don't know how to respond without feeling like we're taking advantage of them. When I wanted to find a school, I thought maybe I would find someplace that would have classes in the evening, but probably I wouldn't be able to make it all the time, so maybe I'd only get to go once or twice a week. Here, they say we should come whenever we have free time - someone will be available to teach us. When we leave in the morning, they ask if we'll come back in the afternoon (sometime, I'll have to make time to actually do that; we really only practice tai chi in the morning, and as much as I love it, I also want to learn something about wushu).

I really love being able to go to the tai chi school. I like our tai chi instructor here, but he doesn't do a lot of instructing in the classes (he doesn't correct our forms or explain what we're doing) so it's nice to have someone who can take time to show us what we really should be doing. The class at the other school is more satisfying and also... it's something outside of FenZhong. It's maybe a chance to become part of a community. The teachers we meet are friendly - I don't even just mean welcoming and smiling this time, I mean they seem like they want to be our friends. They're closer to our age (at least some of them are) than many of the teachers at FenZhong, and at least some of them don't have babies. So… I'm hopeful. I know that probably we'll still be outsiders for a long time, but maybe not entirely.

list

2007-11-17T08:29:00.000-06:00

Sooo there's a whole list of things I've been meaning to post about.

1. letters to Eastwood:
A couple weeks ago, the unit the sixth-graders were working on was about sending letters to penpals, so we had them write letters that (someday when I've stopped being irresponsible) I'll send home and they'll go to some kids at Eastwood, who will hopefully sometime have time to write some responses. Some letter-writers were more successful than others, but there were some pretty cute ones, and sometime soon maybe I'll post some highlights.

2. weather:
I'm not actually sure what I really wanted to say about the weather. It's been pretty nice lately, though smoggy like crazy. Some days, we can stare straight at the sun (* cough * not that we ever would, of course, but we could) and it's just a reddish circle in the clouds - it feels less bright that staring at the lightbulbs in our apartment. It's been getting colder lately, too. A couple days ago it was probably actually freezing, which was unfortunate because that was the day of

3. 7 hour power outage:
Not my favorite event, and the fact that it was so cold that day made it worse, since heat is maybe dependent on electricity? Running water certainly is, at least, as we noticed that afternoon when we could no longer wash our hands (on the bright side, though, the lack of running water meant that the leak in the bathroom stopped and the floor was dry for a while). Also, we have no non-electric means of heating food, so we went out for lunch. Luckily, lunch is often cooked on makeshift gas stoves on the street, and the fact that there was no electricity wasn't really a problem.

4. Japanese pigs:
This week, classes were all weird 'cause the students had a huge test (apparently a huge disheartening test; everyone I've talked with says it was really bad this time). The only classes we had to teach at the high school this week were a couple days of third-year writing, so we team taught it and played a game with collaborative story-writing. We gave them half of a first sentence and told them to finish it, then had them pass their stories on so the next person could write the next sentence (and so on). Many stories were pretty good, and most of the kids seemed to be having some fun, but one story got stamped with a great big "REJECTED!" It went something like this: "I love English. I hate Japanese. They are pigs." which was probably the first really unfriendly unabashedly racist sentiment we've encountered so far.

5. Man on bicycle with grandson:
An old man was riding his bicycle down one of the muddy, narrow back streets in our neighborhood. It was pretty busy, so he had to weave around pedestrians and other bikers. He, like many people, was carrying a passenger on his bicycle. Unlike most people, his passenger was about two years old, sitting on top of an old, well-loved soccer ball in a basket attached to the back of the bicycle.

6. Oh! Bicycles!
Speaking of, Mr. Mi, the first person from Fenyang we met in China, took us out this morning to buy bicycles, and now we are the proud owners of some lovely bikes. It was kind of funny - we were maybe a little self-conscious since none of us really know much about how to choose a good bicycle, but then it seemed like the only criterion we were really expected to be using was whether or not we liked the color. We remembered our experiences pushing bikes up a mountain, though, and we bemused them all by picking up just about every bicycle in the store to find the relatively lightweight ones (we made sure they're all pretty attractive colors, too).

7. Wushu!
Basically since we got here, I've been interested in trying to go to some sort of wushu (martial arts) class. We have taiji classes during the week, and those are great, but I really loved Tang Soo Do in high school and aikido at Carleton, and I want to try to find the same sort of community and camaraderie that existed in those groups. Also, I want to have the chance to get to know people outside of the context of Miss Lee the foreign teacher. Anyway, this is something I'd mentioned to Mr. Ren a little bit once, but sort of let fizzle afterwards. For the last couple weeks, I've been eyeing the sporting goods store we've gone to a few times, gathering my courage to ask them if they know a place I can go. I like the store a lot - we went there for badminton rackets and birdies, a soccer ball, and a basketball, and the people there are friendly, which is nice, but even more refreshingly, they speak slowly and smile and use easy words. Tonight, Katrina and I went in looking for little five pound dumbbells (which you apparently buy by the pound here). Afterwards, I (finally) asked if there was someplace I could study wushu, and the guy said he knows a very good teacher and tomorrow if I go back, he'll show me the school and introduce me to him. I am super excited! Also super proud! Yessssssss, successful communication!

8. Cat, and visiting the doctor in China
Actually, this story's not really mine to tell. Rabies vaccine in China is super-cheap (under $25 for the whole series), and visiting the doctor can be done with no paperwork whatsoever (or arranging for the doctor to come visit you)

Sooooo now I'll just post this, and maybe sometime later I'll post some pictures.

Explosions!

2007-11-06T07:15:00.000-06:00

How do you say "exploding radiator" in Chinese? OH! That's right, you say "my classroom on Sunday."

(There were no children sitting next to the radiator in question, so no one was hurt at all and no one even got wet except maybe their shoes when they were trying to climb out of the rapidly flooding room, so it was just funny and startling and y'all shouldn't be worried)

"Exploding" is too much, really; it didn't exactly explode. There was a pop and a bang and something came flying off and water came rushing out and we evacuated the room to finish class sitting on the steps in front of the school (this was Sunday middle school class, not regular high school). Coming back 20 minutes later to look at the room, steam was pouring out the windows and water was pouring out the door. It was misty and warm and really was like a sauna; we couldn't see more than a few feet.

Sunday classes are somewhat divided by ability and somewhat by age - the Book 11 kids are mostly sixth graders, and the middle school kids are mostly middle schoolers, but there are some younger kids in both those classes. Bart is in the middle school class, and it took a while before I realized how young he actually is. He's just barely tall enough to reach the blackboard. I think he comes up to my elbow. All the kids think he's adorable (or at least it seems that way), and it turns out he's only six or seven. His English is pretty much excellent, but he's definitely not a teenager (or even a preteen) in the way some of the others are. A couple weeks ago, he ran up to my desk, gave me a corn-flavored candy (it really did taste just like corn), and ran away to hide. This week during break, he kept writing "CLASS" on the board, erasing the C, giggling, erasing the L, giggling, and starting over again.

Birthdays in China are celebrated with fireworks at noon, something we noticed earlier when our 4th period classes were always interrupted at the end by the sound of firecrackers. Weddings are also celebrated with explosions. There's a car that drives through town sometimes with large rockets on its back end (they're probably each about four feet long and maybe six inches across or something). When the rockets go off, there is flame shooting out the end and the sound is like thunder when the storm has maybe gotten a little too close and really you ought to go back inside now, only much more terrifying because it is unexpected and accompanied by fire and explosion. We've never managed to get a picture of this car because whenever it's around we tend to want to drop to the ground and cover our heads (or at least dash into the closest store to hide), but I'm including a picture I found on the internet that is kind of similar.

(really the car is much smaller and not military-looking, and although the rockets are probably about the same size as in that picture, they just shoot flames and are terrifying; the rockets don't actually go anywhere)

Lots of text, no pictures.

2007-10-30T07:33:00.000-06:00

We decided to be adventurous and try new things during dinner one day and found ourselves eating a meal that consisted of some moderately unpleasant fishy greens and a plate of steaming hot pork fat, after which we decided to try only one new dish at every meal. That may have been the same week that we were served liver-and-stomach-lining soup at lunch after teaching elementary school.
Mr. Ren invited us to borrow some bicycles and he would take us to a temple that was very very close; prior to departure, we said that gee, we hoped it wasn’t on top of a mountain, but hey, Mr. Ren didn’t seem like a really serious bicyclist anyway and we couldn’t imagine him riding up a mountain. We were sort of half right; he still doesn’t seem like a serious bicyclist, but he does own a motorcycle, so while we huffed and puffed and panted and eventually pushed our bicycles up the tallest mountain in the area, he cruised along on our motorcycle. The temple itself was interesting; we met the caretaker and he invited us into his home for water and fruit. He house is built into the mountain; it has rounded walls and is very warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Coming down the mountain was exciting, too, as we discovered that the brakes on the bike that Julie rode only worked when you didn’t really need them (she made it down all in one piece and without falling off and is now perfectly safe, but we have decided that when we buy bikes, we’d like the kind with brakes).
Other than that – things are going all right. My friends who are not lazy bums like me spend an awful lot of time working and not as much time relaxing, and I spend not quite enough time working and a little too much time lollygagging, but I imagine sometime we’ll work out a balance. I’m a little frustrated lately with lesson planning. We had a meeting last week with students to discuss their ideas about how to improve classes for grades 1 and 2, and most of the advice for me boiled down to “Please talk slower and louder, and pleeeeeeaaaaase don’t give us any more boring articles,” which all made pretty good sense. Shortly afterwards we had a meeting with our boss in which he suggested that I should try to teach more articles straight from the Gao Kao (the college entrance exam). The kids aren’t learning English because they’re interested; they’re learning it because of the test pressure, so I should concentrate more on preparing them for the test (I’m oversimplifying his suggestion, but that’s basically it). It feels like pretty much the opposite of what the kids asked for, and I’m not sure what to do with that combination of suggestions. It’s not a super urgent problem, though, since starting next week we’ll be rotating grades every week, so I won’t see my kids again for three weeks.
Oh! Other exciting news items – one, we all got packages from home in the last week, so it’s been a week filled with chocolate and books and prunes and thinly sliced salami and parently love, which has made us all very happy. The other thing is that we have a friend! We’ve been calling him Baozi Man for a while, and last week he invited himself over for dinner (we went to his shop for dinner and he sat down with us and said, “Hey, don’t you think it’d be a good idea if you had me over for some American food? How’s Monday for you? You can just cook whatever you would eat at home,”) so last night we made pizza (by “we” I mean mostly “Julie and Katrina”) and he came over and ate our pizza and said we forgot to put something in it that may have been iodine or may have been alkaline or probably was something else altogether; we never did quite manage to understand each other. He bullied us into eating more than any of us wanted and when Katrina refused to eat that last piece of pizza, he said something to her that I translated as “You’re… something,” forgetting that even when we speak our secret language (English), other people can sometimes understand a little, and for the rest of the evening he told us that we either were or were not “something” based on whether or not we did what he said.

General update

2007-10-15T01:37:00.000-06:00

We're super-busy these days. Last week we had our first days of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) prep classes and activity classes (I'm teaching folk tales, Katrina's teaching poetry, and Julie's teaching journalism) and we started taking tai chi classes in the morning's, so now we're spending lots of time trying to prepare lots of lessons every week and do research on what the third-year kids should be doing to try to get into an American college if they want to try that, and Mr. Ren wants us each to write some sort of research paper about our teaching. Oh, and there are some students forming English clubs that they want us to advise (one of them might have up to 400 students in it; I have no idea what we could possibly do with 400 students), and we're maybe adding another two hour middle school lesson on Sunday afternoons (we did this week, actually, but there was only one student who came, so it was pretty informal this time).
On Saturday Marilyn, one of Katrina's regular students and my TOEFL student, invited us to go look around the city with her for a while. She took us to a church that was built by some Americans who may have been from Carleton, and she had us try a local snack ("Not food," she told Katrina, "snacks!"), stinky tofu. Stinky tofu is... stinky. We ate it with a moderately delicious sauce, which is good, because, as Julie observed, stinky tofu tastes like horses smell. After that, Marilyn invited us to her home for a fruit smoothie. The smoothie was.... amazing. It was perhaps a distant cousin of what you might think of when you hear "fruit smoothie." She chopped up some fruit - apples and pears and little oranges - and some jello, then she microwaved a bar of chocolate with some yogurt and poured the mixture over the fruit chunks. As a final touch, she added some little gummy candies. It was tasty, but unexpected.

Pictures!

2007-10-14T07:18:00.000-06:00

So we did in fact go on our trip to Pingyao, the ancient walled city. We took the bus down for an amazingly inexpensive 10 kuai each (about $1.25), though we had been warned away from the bus (a cab would be safer, we were told). The bus was actually pretty great; we made friends with some Chinese students who were traveling to Pingyao - it was kind of too loud and bumpy for conversation (and also none of our linguistic skills were really up for it), but they asked if we had pen and paper and we spent a long time passing notes to each other (I am a beautiful girl, they are nice boys, and we have an invitation to visit them at their college if we have time). Eventually the girl sitting on my other side got in on it, too, and wrote a note saying, "I want to communicate with you, but my spoken English is very bad. What is your name?" which maybe expresses the spirit behind most of our interactions with anybody in China. She lives in Fenyang (the guys we were talking with don't; they are going to college somewhere nearby learning to be PE teachers) and is going to the medical college to become a nurse, though it is not her dream. I don't know what her dream is; she was going to tell us, but the bus got to a bridge we couldn't drive across (there were giant piles of dirt and mud in the way) so we had to get off, walk across, and switch buses ("Don't lose the foreigners!" says the driver), and when we got on our new bus, she wasn't sitting next to me anymore.
Anyway. Pingyao was beautiful. Here are some pictures.Once upon a time, the city was prosperous - it was the site of the first bank in China - but it became less prosperous and was never modernized. Now it is famous as the best-preserved walled city in China, and it's prosperous again, though now as more of a tourist destination than a hub of trading. The center of the old city (there's a newer, modern city outside the walls) is a pretty-much-no-motor-vehicles zone.
At night, the city is lit with red lanterns. The whole time we were there, it was raining and cold, and at night, everything glistened. It was nice.

This is silly and blurry; that glowing thing behind me is the Market Tower (or something like that, we think).

Two views of the courtyard of the hostel we were staying in (Yamen Hostel; it was recommended by the Lonely Planet). The first is at night and the second is when I woke in the morning and snuck out of the room to find breakfast before my roommates woke.

In addition to breakfast, I found a friend.
That day, we bought a ticket to get into most of the museums in the city. It also let us through the gate to get up and walk along the wall, and we walked around from the North Gate to the South Gate. It was easily my favorite thing that the ticket got us into; it was quiet and peaceful and offered a different view of the city.
After walking outside in the cold and wet for a few hours, we stopped in a different hostel and ordered some hot chocolate that was expensive but was also made with real milk and chocolate and, more importantly, was hot.
We spend two nights in Pingyao. The second morning we took the bus up to Taiyuan, the provincial capital, where we did nothing but buy cheese and butter.
Annnnnd that's what we did with our National Day holiday. More later.

Holidays, weather

2007-10-03T17:57:00.000-06:00

Hokay, so.
Mid-Autumn Festival was last Tuesday, and we had the day off from school (no one knew that we were getting the day off until Monday morning, though, which seems like awfully short notice, but it was definitely a happy surprise for everyone). We didn't do anything super exciting, but Mr. Ren invited us to his house to make more dumplings (carrot and mutton filled) for lunch, and he had us over again that night to sit with his family and eat fruit and watch the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival tv program. People kept telling us about how the festival was a day for being with family, so we sat on the couch with Mr. Ren and his family and missed home a bit (well, I did, anyway), but it was a nice evening and it was very sweet of Mr. Ren to invite us over.
Monday was National Day, China's 58th birthday, so everyone except us had the Monday and Tuesday off (we had to teach elementary school in the morning both days, but we have four days off starting today to make up for it), and one of Katrina's students, Marilyn, invited us to go see the world famous Fen Chiew (Fen Jiu) distillery. Fen Jiu is the local hard liquor (when we had lunch at Haihua's house, she gave us each a little shot to try, but it was not delicious, so at the end of lunch when her brother was cleaning up, most of our fenjiu was still in our glasses. He looked at them for a second and then poured them out to use to clean and disinfect the table), and the distillery has really beautiful green gardens as well as rooms full of liquor. Apparently our tour was a little short, though, 'cause they've closed some areas to prepare for the upcoming Alcohol Festival.
Elementary school classes are a little nutso. I have it easy - my classes are a middle school class and one of the older elementary classes. The middle school kids are so easy to deal with, and even though the elementary kids are pretty rambunctious, at least they can already speak some English. Katrina and Julie both have younger kids, who I think must be even harder.
The kids don't have much of a sense of personal space or property; they're curious about us and they dig into our bags pretty much whenever our backs are turned (if they take things during break, though, they always give it back at the end). Some of them got my camera out of my backpack on Monday, so.... here's a few of the kids in my elementary class. The classes are hard, mostly because they're a pack of energetic kids who don't really speak English and we are inexperienced teachers who don't really speak Chinese (we each have a Chinese person helping us, too; if we didn't, Sunday classes would be impossible). On top of that, we teach in some unused rooms in another school, and the classrooms are pretty minimal. There's chalk, and a chalkboard, and desks. My classroom doesn't seem to have electric lights I fiddled with the light switches for a while before noticing that there weren't even lightbulbs in most of the lights. Some of the kids need glasses; very few have them. There's a pair of twin boys in one of my classes who share one pair of glasses. There weren't classes last year for the really young kids, so Katrina and Julie have to figure everything out as they go along.
The weather here has been fantastic (I am the only person who thinks this). It's been damp and cool and just like home; I was talking to one of my students and she said that there has never been weather like this in Fenyang before. It's been drizzling for about a week. The roads really aren't designed to handle water, so there's standing water on all the streets and the back roads are in really awful condition (they're in pretty awful condition even when it's dry).
Today is the start of a four-day weekend for us, so we think we're going to go to Pingyao, which is supposed to be lovely, and also probably Taiyuan (where we can buy cheese!) and maybe Taigu (where some folks from Oberlin are teaching). Anyway, I'm off to start my day. Bai bai.

Ambushed!

2007-09-16T15:38:00.000-06:00

We starting teaching our elementary school classes, and they were kind of crazy and oh-my-gosh kids have lots of energy. We sang “Little Bunny Foo Foo” and some games and oh my, it was nutso tiring and involved lots of shouting and trying to get kids’ attention, and then! And then! We had a sneak-attack totally unexpected banquet! For lunch! So now it is 2:30 in the afternoon and I am inebriated! Sigh.

We ate lots of food with a bunch of people from the school, mostly Chinese teachers. One, Zhang-laoshi, was particularly friendly (also particularly drunk; Mr. Ren poured him a gigantic ridiculous class of Fen Jiu (which is brewed right here in Fenyang and ranges from super-strong to tolerable) and he drank it all); he lives across the way from us and talked to us a bunch about how we are all good friends now. It was pretty crazy; I’m glad none of us are boys, or we would have been required to drink more to prove our manhood (there was one teacher who came to visit our table, and Mr. Ren explained that he was a man, not a woman, and that true men had to drink Fen Jiu), and I think we’ve proved our manhood enough for one day as it is. Anyway. The banquet was fun and full of friendly folks, but I am glad that we don’t have to teach class anymore today or anything, ‘cause I don’t think I’m competent to teach class right now.

To Lishi (Luliang?)

2007-09-14T23:04:00.000-06:00

So we filled out the paperwork for our official residence permits - we had to drive out to Lishi (Luliang? I don't know which one is actually the name of the place (Luliang actually ought to have umlaut (umlauts?) over the "u")) to get them, and it almost looked like we'd have to try coming back again sometime 'cause apparently the police station is at least mostly closed from Friday to Sunday (a little awkward, since we teach classes at the high school Monday through Thursday), but luckily, Mr. Ren was friends with someone, so we got to do it today. We should actually get the permits sometime soonish, probably within the week, and then we'll be all set.

The drive to Lishi was pretty cool. We hadn't been out of the city and awake since leaving Beijing, so it was nice to see some of the countryside. The first few days we were in Fenyang, the pollution was really bad; we couldn't see the sky, and we met a girl from the medical college who said that she had been there for three years and had never seen stars in Fenyang. The weather today was beautiful, though. It was clear and blue and had little bits of white clouds that really seemed like clouds and not smog.

Sooo this picture is from the drive out to Lishi - the air got worse the closer we got to the bigger city, and we passed an evil looking factory with flames shooting out of it. (pictures by Katrina)

Claaaasses

2007-09-12T22:57:00.000-06:00

We’re in our second week of classes here in Fenyang. The first couple classes the first week were terrifying; I felt completely unqualified and incompetent and like what was I thinking, moving to China to teach English? Things have mostly settled down now – we haven’t started teaching all the classes we’ll eventually have, but we’ve mostly gotten the hang of the regular high school classes.

The way it works is we each teach one grade of high school from Monday to Thursday. I’m teaching second grade (which is like the high school juniors), and we focus on reading. Katrina’s teaching listening and speaking to the first grade, and Julie’s teaching writing to the third grade. There’s a lot of emphasis in all the English classes on doing well on a couple exams – the college entrance exam (which apparently only about one in ten students pass the pass/fail rate for which we hear conflicting reports about, but probably fewer than half will pass on the first try) has an English section, and also if they want to try to go to college in America, they have to do well on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). For each grade, there are 14 classes, and we see each class once a week, so every week we teach basically the same lesson (with some changes depending on the level of each class) 14 times. I think my average class size is somewhere around 60; the biggest is about 70 and the smallest is 44.

The kids seem pretty good-natured and awfully well-behaved. We’re s’posed to read newspaper articles and talk about them, and the kids are not very eager to volunteer answers or speak in front of the class, buuut neither was I. I need to work on speaking more slowly and loudly, and gee whiz I hope I can find articles and activities that are more fun and interesting than the ones I’ve found so far .

Soccer!

2007-09-01T22:51:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we went to lunch with Haihua, who was at Carleton last year as one of the Chinese language associates. The food was delicious, and it was neat to meet her family (though we couldn’t talk to them very much), but the most fun was after we were done eating. She has a daughter, Xiaoyu (I think), who is eight, and a bunch of Xiaoyu’s friends came over to see the foreigners and try out the English phrases they knew (Hello, nice to meet you, thank you, how are you?). One of the phrases was “Let’s play a game!” so we went out with them and played hide-and-seek and a game that was new to us that involved throwing a little beanbag and trying to either catch it our dodge it, and then we finished with soccer. It was way fun.
After that, we went home for a while, but later on, we ran into our neighbor across the hallway and she invited us in for tea and conversation. Katrina had just baked a few loaves of bread and banana bread, and our neighbor (whose name I still don’t know) was really impressed that we could bake our own bread (most Chinese people don’t use ovens, I think), so we invited her in to try some. It was a pretty hilarious experience. Our apartment is large and nice and everything, but it definitely has the feel of being inhabited by people in transition; it doesn’t feel like anyone lives here yet. Our neighbor and her daughters tried the bread (they liked the banana bread and might have also liked the regular bread; I couldn’t tell) and then wandered around and looked into our bedrooms and told us that we needed to get real clotheslines put in – we were going to be here for a whole year, after all – and that we really should get all our clothes folded and put away, and we needed to put all the pots and pans away, too. It was definitely friendly of her, but unexpected, and eventually we distracted her by showing her photos of our families (she thinks Katrina’s brother’s hair is too long).
Today, we have free time, we think, so we’re planning on going on an expedition to buy a new kitchen table (there’s a little one in there already, but we could use some more surface space in there). If we feel really crazy, we might even try to replace the missing lightbulbs.

We Arrived!

2007-08-28T22:37:00.000-06:00

Hours spent packing: a few

Number of times we watched the same bags go ‘round the carousel before acknowledging that they were never going to magically turn into our luggage: many

Katrina and I arrived safe and luggageless in Beijing on Saturday, where we met Julie and Mr. Mi at the airport after filing a report with a very helpful lady in charge of "property irregularities." The four of us took a bus out to a hotel where we met Nina, another Carleton graduate who had been working in Fenyang this summer, and we all had dinner together before collapsing in our respective beds. We were taking a sleeper bus to Fenyang Sunday night, so during the day we walked down to Tiananmen Square before checking out of our hotel (Nina was kind enough to let us camp out in her room until it was time to go catch the bus - you can see in the picture that we were a bit tired), and then Katrina and I found a shopping center where we managed to buy a couple pairs of underwear (I will never again neglect to pack a change of clothes in my carry-on). Happily, we have since heard that our luggage has been found and should be delivered to the school pretty soon (I am excited).

Now we are in Fenyang, and the apartment seems huge. We need to go pick up some stuff, and it can be quirky, like when we heard a gurgling sound and water came spurting out of a hole in the wall (we think that there was some work being done on the pipes; anyway, it’s stopped now), but it seems great, generally.

First post!

2007-08-27T17:53:00.000-06:00

So... Hello from China