It's that time again friends and readers, or Freaders as I will now call you. This is going to be a long one.
This last week has truly been a blur, and I am now typing this from the 4th floor apartment of a building in a new city. This city will be our permanent home for the next 12 months. It's crazy to think that after all of the time that I have spent here, all of the people I have met, and all of the strange and offensive things I have smelled, I am only 1/13th of the way through this crazy mess I have gotten myself into.
Before I get to the new and exciting Foshan chapter of my story, I need to wrap up a few threads about our old life in Zhaoqing. So allow me to do that now please. Is that okay? Thanks.
The last summer camp for Bosskids went pretty much without a hitch. There were some small differences from our previous weeks at the camp however. Firstly, our Greek friends had some time off and so they went back to Greece for two weeks. With them gone, our Canadian friend moved and gone, and with our friend Cynthia no longer working at the camp, Laura and I were truly on our own. Sure we had Arby (Maybe it's actually R.B.? I never asked), but Arby was not the most social person in the world, and we didn't have 4 weeks of relationship built up with him either.
This is not to say that Arby was rude, mean, or antisocial in a negative sense. He was just very keeps-to-himself. He also had an air of lateness about his person. Although he was always on time, Arby always seemed like he was 30 minutes late for a very important meeting; he walked around quietly, aloofly, and often out of breath while his eyes flitted about the room nervously as if he was looking for a clock.
Without sounding too dismissive of this generally really nice fellow, we did not socialize with him at all during the time that we knew him.
So, completely alone in Zhaoqing for the first time, we came to realize how comfortable with the town and our surroundings we had grown. We were completely independent, going from place to place with an ease and comfort that one would expect of two people who have lived in the same place for a lot longer than just 4 weeks. We had our favorite restaurants and our favorite hangouts, we had our favorite places to get snacks and bubble tea. In an effort to keep fit (it is way too damn hot to go running or work out every day), we tried to walk at least 8 miles per day, and as such we had explored a great deal of the city center by the time it came to leave.
Work was also whizzing by at an alarming rate. My "teaching topics" with the young boy in the morning are a lot harder for me to remember than the first week's were. I believe we did "Body Language", "Environmental Protection", "Zhaoqing", "Endangered Animals", and "Traveling in America".
You could ask me now, you could tie me to a chair and interrogate me within an inch of my life, but I still would not be able to tell you how I managed to fill 2.5 hours every day on these topics, especially with the provided powerpoints that were only about 7 slides each. I do remember a few things, though. I remember that I had the somewhat brilliant idea of having the student (whom you will recall we named Steve) be the teacher on the Zhaoqing day.
"I have an idea! Why don't we test your English skills by having you be the teacher! Tell me all about your hometown of Zhaoqing". This worked brilliantly for two reasons. First, I thought it rather silly and presumptuous for me to lecture a kid who had lived here every day of his 15 years about a city I had lived in for less than 30 days. Second, for some reason that probably made a lot of sense to the person who made the slideshow for me, the text of this powerpoint was completely in Chinese. TIC, baby. TIC.
I remember nothing about the body language powerpoint at all, but I do remember playing charades with Steve for about an hour. Every time he guessed what I was doing ("Crying!" "Hungry!" "Choking!"), I said "See, you can communicate a lot with body language!"
The Environmental Protection slide show was mostly about smog and acid rain. It was rather uncomfortable because little Steve was very critical about the Chinese government's involvement, or rather lack of involvement when it came to these issues. Despite what I was told before coming to China, it seems like people here are very open about criticizing the government, and there are very few topics that are completely verboten. However, I am still extremely reticent to actually partake in any conversation that may result in me getting into any sort of trouble whatsoever. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but it is times like these when I am very keenly aware of how far away from home 7,000 miles is, and how despite legion similarities, China is still a different country than America.
This led to me dodging or rephrasing a lot of his questions and comments about pollution and China's ineffective government ( His words, in case anyone in China is reading this :-) ). I was very happy when that lesson was over with, to say the least.
The Endangered species day was probably Steve's favorite, and was mine too. I am passionate about animals, as any of you who know me will attest to. I also know a lot about them. This came in handy because the powerpoint focused on only 12 species, most of which I was unfamiliar with. The powerpoint actually said "These are the 12 species that are endangered in the world right now". I am still not clear on what that means, exactly. I don't think they meant 12 most endangered, nor do I think they meant "12 most endangered in China". So I think that they were just wrong or poorly translated the Wikipedia article they found*
*Wikipedia is blocked in China, actually. So is Google. Chinese people use a website called "Baidu" which functions as both a search engine and a wikipedia type page.
The final day, travel in America, was pretty hilarious. The first slide said "Here is every place you should visit in America". The places listed were the following:
-Niagra Falls
-Empire State Building
-Disneyworld
-Hawaii
I swear to God, this is what was on every page:
-The page for Niagra falls had a photo that was either photoshopped or was from some sort of stunt event, because the falls were colored like a rainbow. The slide said "This is what Niagra falls looks like!
-The page for the Empire state building said, "From the top of this, the tallest building in New York, you can see many beautiful sights, such as the King Kong"
-The slide for Disneyworld just had a picture of Mulan and Mickey Mouse and said "You know these guys!"
-The slide for Hawaii was just a picture of a beach with no words
I spent most of the first hour correcting mistakes in the powerpoint, and much of the last 90 minutes telling him about other great places in the US like Central Park, The Hoover Dam (hehe), Yosemite National Park, San Francisco, and Chicago. I spent a lot of time bragging about Michigan, don't you worry. We talked a lot about Sleeping Bear Dunes and "Up North". I also showed him photos and video clips of cedar point. I showed him a POV video of the Dragster and he said "I think I am going to be sick". He nearly passed out from watching the video.
My other student, Vera, also was much better in week two. She was more open to speak, more genial, and generally more pleasant to be around. We spent a lot of time going over vocabulary and discussion topics, but as the week dragged on we got a lot more informal. I found that just chatting with her got her to actually use more English without assistance than doing anything with work sheets. I was able to subtly teach her some grammar rules and some vocabulary this way, and I think she will probably remember these things longer because she wasn't so nervous.
On Wednesday we were talking about time, and how sometimes it feels fast and sometimes it feels slow. I, without thinking about it, said to her, "A watched pot never boils!". She looked at me quizzically. I suddenly realized that she probably had no idea what that meant, even if she knew what the individual words meant.
I jumped up and ran over to the the board, and started writing out the phrase, along with some diagrams. After about 10 minutes she understood both the literally and metaphorical meaning of the phrase. Both she and the TA, Cherry, thought that it was really cool to learn a common English parlance, so I decided to do some more.
Over our last two days, this was basically all of the work we did. It was a lot of fun teaching phrases like, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away", and I feel like they both got a lot out of it. Not only did she learn new vocabulary, but she also learned some common things that English speakers may say, and it also got her thinking critically and analytically in her second language. Cool stuff.
Also of note during our last week at Bosskids was that we had another talent show thing at the end. This time around it was a lot less organized, made a lot less sense, and was generally much more chaotic. I assumed, having learned the first time around, that Laura and I would be asked to participate in the show. As such, we practiced learning a new song to sing/play on the guitar (Jimmy Buffet's Cheeseburger in Paradise!). This felt rather vain, but it ended up being for a good reason. Literally two hours before the show I was asked to be the Turnip in the show again, and also for us to both perform a song.
For some reason, they decided not to have the talent show thing in the auditorium room, which was clearly designed for talent show things. No, this time they decided to have it in the playground area. This made absolutely no sense, since the group was smaller this time around and so the parents would fit more easily in the auditorium than last time. The acts were also much less well rehearsed, and made no sense even by Chinese standards. Also they had two different groups doing the Turnip story; one immediately followed the other one.
Actually, to be perfectly blunt, everything was kind of less well run during the second camp. The Chinese teachers and TAs were a lot less hands on in the classes, according to Laura, and apparently our Greek friend/manager had to have a stern talking to two of them for just playing on their phones during class. Everything seemed more last minute, and more helter skelter than before. Even the lunch time routine was weird. The restaurant upstairs was often extremely late delivering the food, and instead of the usually "rotate between 4 dishes" routine, they switched to a "alternate back and forth between 2 dishes" routine. Since the average age of the students was much younger this time around, they were a lot more picky and had a more difficult time sitting still waiting for the late food.
Almost paradoxically, this group of children was much more enjoyable to work with than the first group. They were all pretty well behaved, at least when I interacted with them, and they all seemed to love me and Laura a lot more. Carmen, the little 4 year old who was in love with me last time also attended the camp again, but she seemed to be over her little love affair. This time my favorite kids were little Jackie (who we later learned was actually named 'Jacket'), and the twins Kevin and Robot.
There was only one kid who was a bit of a trouble maker, but Laura basically forced him to behave himself every day, so he didn't cause too much of a disturbance.
One last surprise to us was delivered on Thursday, the day before our final day. One of the teachers told Laura that the theme for the talent show would be "Laura's surprise birthday party". She told Laura that she had to act surprised, and that no, it did not matter that Laura's birthday was actually in March. Typical China.
Laura received a number of homemade presents from the children on those last few days, and everyone outside of me and that one teacher legitimately thought it was her birthday. They even bought her a cake and gave it to her at the end of the talent show. The cake was delicious, so I didn't spoil the secret to anyone.
Our last night in Zhaoqing was celebrated by me, Laura, and our friend Cynthia. She had spent the last two weeks traveling around China and visiting her friends and relatives in Hong Kong. College was starting back up for her in Guangzhou, so she had been making the rounds in a sort of "end of summer" revelry. She returned to Zhaoqing to pack up her stuff and to say goodbye to us.
We decided to celebrate our leaving and the end of the summer by going to Spango, an Italian restaurant owned by a westerner. I am not sure if I have mentioned Spango before, but it is delicious. Laura and I went there once a week for pizza, which was as good as the pizza at home. They actually gave us a VIP card, which gave us a 12% discount, because we were such good pizza eating fatties. I wasn't sure when my next pizza meal would be, and I was pretty sure that Cynthia had never been there, so it seemed like the perfect place to go.
After dinner we decided to go to the outdoor bar where our Canadian friend took us on our first night in town. It was the only place I knew of that served beer at a reasonable price ($11 US for 6 half-liter sized bottles), and it seemed fitting to come full circle. Cynthia's friend Parker came with us to the bar. We had not met Parker before, but Cynthia had wanted to see her before returning to Guangzhou. Parker, meanwhile, was about to move to Canada to go to a university in Halifax and wanted to practice a little more English before departing.
When Parker arrived at Spango to walk with us to the bar, Cynthia introduced her by saying, "This is my friend Parker. She is short and fat". This sort of thing is totally normal here, and people don't get offended so easily, especially by things that are true. Why would Parker be upset about Cynthia just saying some facts? Laura and I had to stifle our uncomfortable laughter, though. What was doubly funny was that Parker was not really very large at all, and was basically the same height as all the other Chinese girls I had seen so far.
We went to the bar and had a great time. We taught Cynthia and Parker the "Dice Game" that my mother and grandma like to play all the time, we watched the Chinese version of "The Voice", and joked about all kinds of things. I was ready to stay out late, but both girls got tired at about 11 so we headed home. Laura and I packed our bags and went to bed.
A quick aside about our sleeping habits in China so far. I am not sure if I have mentioned these things yet, but they are integral to understanding what my life has been like here so far. Firstly, beds in China are HARD. It's unbelievable how stiff and uncomfortable they are. Chinese people believe that hard surfaces are better for the body for some reason. We actually learned when we got to Foshan than our hard-as-hell bed in the hotel room had been made extra soft for us westerners, but more on that later.
Secondly, the walls here are thin. And so many people live near each other here that everything is loud all the time. There's always at least a few people who wake up at 4 or 5am every day and have some sort of loud screaming match with other people who wake up at 4 or 5am every day. My Chinese isn't good enough yet to understand what they're saying, but I assume they are saying something like this:
"JESUS CHRIST IT'S EARLY DON'T YOU THINK"
"YEAH WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH US I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THE SUN CAME OUT THIS EARLY"
"WHAT ARE YOU EATING OVER THERE FOR BREAKFAST? RICE?"
"MAN IT'S WAY TOO EARLY TO EAT. I'M JUST GOING TO SHOUT A WHILE LONGER"
The time from 11pm to about 4am is usually somewhat quiet, although on the weekends people stay up later. Also cats and dogs like to fight a lot in what I can only assume is some sort of cat and dog fight club. So, even at these times it's not the most quiet.
Believe it or not, though, we have gotten pretty used to it so far.
Thus ends the Zhaoqing chapter of my China trip.
Saturday morning we woke up, finished packing, at breakfast, and waited for our rides to show up. Originally we were told we would be taking a bus to Foshan, which is about an hour east of Zhaoqing. After chatting with my new bosses and supervisors, though, they decided to send someone named Jason out to pick us up.
Jason and the driver arrived at about noon, so we checked out of our hotel and loaded our bags into the car.
First of all, this new school we are going to be working for has people employed JUST to drive people around. They actually have at least two drivers that I know of so far. Jason later told me that the school is actually in the top 3 best elementary boarding schools in the city, and it's apparently the most expensive school. This bodes well for us, I think, although we have not yet started working.
Jason and the driver (whose name I still don't know as of this writing) told us they were hungry, and so we all went in search of food for them. They weren't interested in the restaurants we knew about, and decided instead to go to a hotel's restaurant. I'm of the impression that this is quite common actually. Chinese people love to go to hotel restaurants, even if they aren't staying in the hotel. I could be wrong about this, though.
The hotel that we went to was right next to the one we had been living at for the month. We stepped inside and immediately were more than a little angry. While our hotel was quite serviceable for the time we stayed there, it was far from nice. The maids, as I have said previously, were extremely inconsistent, and the hotel seemed a little gross, dirty, and in need of repair.
I had assumed that this was true of all but maybe the nicest hotels in China. Not so. This hotel next to our own, which looked more or less the same from the outside, was GORGEOUS on the inside. It was one of the nicest hotels I have ever set foot inside. We went to the restaurant/banquet hall area and had a FEAST.
This was, no joke, the first of three enormous meals we had with Jason on that day. All of our meals were paid for by Jason, who used the school's credit card. So needless to say we had a lot of good food.
During our meal we got to know Jason a little bit and our driver not at all (I don't think he can speak Mandarin or English). Jason is in his mid twenties, and is a teacher/general employee at the school. He is very nice and is quite good at English. He described himself as a "party animal", and likes sports a lot. He was visibly disappointed that Laura and I don't like basketball as much as he does, and that we do not know a whole lot about soccer either. We did have a pretty good conversation about the world cup though, and he was pleased to learn that the thing about Arsenal is that they always just walk it in.
After lunch we drove to Foshan. During the drive I got my first really good view of the beautiful Chinese country side (it was night time when we arrived in Zhaoqing by bus, you'll remember). After an hour or so we got into Foshan and headed toward the apartment. On the way we passed by our school, and it is huge! I can't believe how big it is, and I am excited to go there for the first time.
Foshan is absolutely gargantuan. I thought Zhaoqing was big, but I am now starting to understand why everyone was calling it a small town. It's crazy to think that Foshan is also not considered to be a very big city.
We arrived at our apartment building and were brought up to our new home in unit 404.
The apartment is hard to describe. 50% of it is really very nice, and 50% of it is weird and gross. All of the furniture is brand new. It was all still wrapped up when we got there, even the microwave and the little stove cooker thing. The bedrooms are cute and spacious, and the decorating in the rooms is nice as well.
On the other hand, the bathroom looks shockingly like the set of the first Saw movie, and the kitchen is a little bit weird and gross too. All of the walls are a nice clean white, except for one wall right next to the bathroom that is literally falling apart.
The bathroom itself is really bizarre. The bathroom IS the shower. Like there is no separate area for showering yourself off. It always smells really weird in there, and I don't mean poop smells. The scent changes back and forth between smells like cigarettes, cat litter, fruit, and other weird non-bathroom things. I think that I have figured out why it smells this way, and it is because all of the bathrooms in the building are on top of one another. I think someone in this building smokes in their bathroom, and someone else has a cat, etc.
The toilet has been a huge source of frustration so far, as it does not really flush solids at all. This is a problem, as I don't need to explain to any of you. They have sent two people out to repair it so far, but as of Monday afternoon it still doesn't really work at all.
The other big negative about the apartment is the bugs. Something that absolutely nobody thought to inform us about before coming to China is that basically 100% of the apartments everywhere have cockroaches. I think we got off lucky, though, because I have only seen one or two and they've all been very small. I still panicked when I saw them though and started making phone calls to various people. But yeah, our Greek and Canadian friends, as well as all of the Chinese friends I've made so far in Zhaoqing and Foshan ALL say that they have cockroaches in their apartment from time to time.
I am not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, if I had known about this ahead of time I don't think I would have agreed to come here. I feel frustrated and a little annoyed that nobody thought this was worth mentioning. On the other hand, it is apparently unavoidable, and I am glad that I am in China and discovering everything the world has to offer. I know that they are harmless to me personally, and we have some traps and cans of raid and stuff, so it shouldn't be too bad. Also, thankfully, they only come into the apartment through one spot: a tiny drain in the kitchen. The bedrooms and bathroom are all completely bugless (believe me I have looked many times), and that is where I would feel the most vulnerable.
Our apartment is quite sizable, and has a good strong AC unit in every room. All in all, I think I will have no trouble living here for the next year.
The beds though. Oh man, the beds. The beds are LITERALLY two planks of wood with some springs in between. I know this because I took the sheets apart. Jason says that these are the highest quality beds that money can buy in China, and I believe him because of how much money the school seems to have. The first night was one that was completely sleepless, and very painful. Last night we got a bit of a brilliant idea though. They provided each bedroom with a big thick comforter for when it gets cold outside (in the winter it goes down to the high 50s and the Chinese people think that this is the worst thing ever). Last night we took all of the comforters and stacked them on top of each other as a protective layer between us and the oppressive wood planks. This has made our bed as comfortable as the one in our hotel, which at this point is acceptable. I slept a lot better last night.
One more surprise that awaited us in Foshan is that Jason is sort of our roommate. I am still not exactly sure what the deal is here. We were told by our liaison lady in Michigan that we were entitled to 2 bedrooms of a 3 bedroom apartment, because we are 2 people. She said we may have to have a roommate, but probably not. We said we understood, but that we would like to not have one if at all possible.
Three days ago she texted me and assured me that we would not have a roommate. Once we arrived at our flat, though, Jason claimed a room as his and moved some clothes and sundry items into there. Not wishing to be rude, but still being more than a little blunt, I asked what the deal was. Basically, the best way I can figure things out between what he and another supervisor has said, he will be living with us until the school year starts, in order to help us and the other foreign teachers living in the building get acclimated to life in Foshan. Once the school year starts, he will live at the boarding school with the other children. The part that has me the most confused and, frankly annoyed, is that apparently he will come and stay with us "on just some weekends" once the school year starts. I am not sure why or when or what exactly that means, but I am going to try and get to the bottom of it because it is hard to get completely comfortable in this new place if we will never know whether or not we'll have company.
Once we were settled into our new place on that first day, having unpacked and done a load of laundry, Jason took us to dinner to meet Angel, the supervisor of the school here. Once again we had an enormous delicious feast, including a whole fish and a whole chicken. I decided to be adventurous and eat the head of the chicken, but Angel stopped me and said "We never eat the head of the chicken in China". I said to her, "But I see people selling duck heads to eat all the time", and she said, "yes we eat duck head all the time, but never chicken". Okay China.... Okay...
After dinner we came back and rested for a while while Jason went to the airport to pick up two more foreign teachers. He asked if we wouldn't mind coming out for a snack with the other teachers once they got back. Since I was eager to meet these guys (they are both Michiganders as well), I agreed.
Of course, it wasn't just a snack, but another enormous ridiculous feast. We had like 10 dishes again. My favorite this time was a seafood porridge with huge chunks of crab meat in it.
The new guys showed up and looked completely bewildered. Apparently they had no been told they were coming to a restaurant. Imagine, traveling for over 26 hours and then being taken to a huge restaurant with 5 Chinese people (and 2 other Americans) and being made to eat a ton of food. They were like zombies, understandably.
We came home and went to bed (this is when I discovered my first little cockroach, so I didn't sleep to well).
The second day was supposed to be a day of getting things done. These things included getting a bank card, getting a bus card, and getting a sim card to make our phones work in China (so our bosses could get ahold of us anywhere). We ended up doing none of these things, because Jason realized that we were missing a foreign teacher. One more teacher is expected from Michigan on Monday (today!) so we decided to hold off and do all of these things in one big trip.
So instead we went to a wal-mart (yet again another huge mall called wal-mart, with an actual wal-mart built in) and went grocery shopping. This trip took basically all day, because there were 4 Americans trying to figure out what sorts of things they could buy and cook and what things they couldn't.
You see, our entire apartment is furnished, including the kitchen. But it is "Chinese furnished". A complete Chinese kitchen is 1 rice cooker, 1 microwave, 1 water boiler, 1 wok, and 1 stove top. There are no ovens here, and so this fact, combined with the "one stove top" thing makes the sorts of meals I'm used to cooking almost impossible. it was very tricky planning out some meals in that wal-mart.
Also, the wal-mart is like a 20 minute bus ride from our apartment, so we had to carefully plan what we would bring, knowing that we had a long trip of carrying heavy things in front of us.
After this 4 hour trip, I took a nap. Laura and I spent the evening exploring the area near our apartment building. It seems as though we live in sort of a housing district. There were not too many businesses within walking distance, at least not from what I could figure out. Hopefully I am wrong though because I do not want to have to take a 20 minute bus ride every time I need to pick up something from the store!
So that catches y'all up on what my life is like over here now. Foshan definitely has a different flavor to it than Zhaoqing. I like some things a lot more, and some things a lot less. We will have to see how everything goes. Apparently school doesn't start until next week, so there will be a lot of down time for the next few days, and I will hopefully have time to really get to know the town better before starting the new job.
Stay classy, America, and China will stay weird.
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