Week 6 - Roach Motels and Private Hells, or, Extra Gravy on that, Please

Well another week has come and gone, and I feel a little bit closer to understanding all of Chinese culture.

Just kidding, it's still really weird and confusing here. I'm not sure I will ever understand it. In fact, most of the initial wide-eyed feelings I had for the first month are gone and there are just some things that I find plain annoying about being here. Why can't anyone follow any traffic laws? Heck, even like 1 out of every 50 traffic laws would please me at this point. People just drive their cars on the sidewalks and park wherever they please. If there's a sign that indicates that motor bikes or cars are forbidden in an area, the only thing you can be sure of is that there will be both bikes and cars in that area in spades. Car horns here are not used as a warning so much as just something you do. Are the four wheels of your car turning? Then the horn should be depressed until the key has been removed from the ignition!

Why is nobody ever in a hurry here? I swear I can walk down the street at a slow, jaunty pace and just be barreling through people who seemingly have nowhere to be. Nothing starts on time, ever. If you are told to be in the meeting room at 4pm, then the meeting will start at 5. This rule does not apply the other way around, however, and if you are not early to wherever you are going then your boss or your supervisor will call you in a panic.

Health and safety? Who needs 'em? There are no safety regulations of any kind and frankly I'm shocked that I haven't seen anyone killed horrifically yet. Construction workers hanging off of skyscrapers and using power tools all with nothing on but a pair of pants (if that), raw meat being sold on the street, and questionable medical standards are all things that I see every day.

And yet...

I still really like it here. I still repeat my "TIC" mantra daily and I find that it works 90% of the time. Sure, that other 10% of the time it can be really stressful ("It's 105 degrees and the air conditioning is broken on this bus and we are at least 50 people over capacity and now we're stuck behind someone who's just going the wrong way down the street for no reason, hurray!"), but I still manage to find something to laugh at every day. When I'm not laughing I am learning and meeting incredibly interesting new people.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm definitely going to be staying here for the rest of the year. Sorry if anyone thought we were going to chicken out and come home early, but I'm staying put.

So what did this week bring? It was paradoxically the busiest and also laziest week we have had yet. I sat around a lot more, and yet I also think I've done more in the last 7 days than in the last 40 combined.

When last I wrote, we had just met two new fellows from Michigan. It was refreshing to see some new faces, and it was nice to hear from some Americans after about a month. The strangest thing happened to me while talking with them for the first time, though. After being away from Americans and, more specifically Michiganders for so long, it was almost like hearing a Michigan accent as an outsider for the first time. I was actually able to hear how it was different from other styles of American accents. It was very eye-opening, or rather ear-opening.

After my last update on Sunday, our Chinese guide/roommate (Jason) fellow told us that we were going to go around town for the day and get all of the essential errands out of the way. These errands included opening a bank account and getting a bus card, among other things.

We set out in the afternoon and our first stop was to go to a Wal-Mart mall. Our guide/roommate (from here forward: "groommate") chose this location first because he wanted to show us where the Wal-Mart was, since it was going to be our main shopping hub for the year, and also to take us to lunch. This was to be the fourth and final meal that the school was to buy for us, and once again it was delicious.

I swear, one of the most frustrating things is watching Chinese people eat. When you go to a restaurant with Chinese people, it is a little bit different from how it's done elsewhere. Unlike in America, where everyone would just get their own entree, the head of the table orders like 15 dishes and then everyone shares. I had four meals at restaurants in a row with our groommate Jason, and each one was absolutely massive. There was more food than the 5 of us could possibly finish every single time, and lunch on Sunday was no exception. The frustration comes from the fact that most Chinese people are so tiny. Jason is easily half my size, and yet he eats at least twice as much food as I do at every meal!

It has been a nice change of pace going out to eat with him, though, because he is much better at ordering than Laura and I are. I am absolutely an adventurous eater (I ate some chicken livers and a fish head this week!), but I am not yet brave enough to just order something random off of a menu. When we went out to eat all month last month, Laura and I stuck to places with picture menus or English translations. Having Jason with us means that not only can he read everything, but that he knows what is good and what is not good. I thought I was eating well last month, and this week I learned just how wrong I was!

After lunch we proceeded to the basement, which was the Wal-Mart. This Wal-Mart was just like the one in Zhaoqing, and indeed just like the ones all over the united states. The only thing that is different is the Chinese food and Chinese writing everywhere. Also the meat and seafood section is much more elaborate here. You can get fresh, live crabs and also live shrimp any day you want. They even sell live frogs and turtles! I've had frog before and found it to be quite good, so I wouldn't be opposed to trying again, but frankly I think I'd be at a loss for how to transport, kill, and prepare the frogs properly. Maybe I'll try my luck in a few weeks.

We decided to play it sort of safe during that first trip, since the Wal-Mart was nearly 20 minutes away from our apartment by bus. We didn't want to get too much meat, or anything else that needed to stay cold. We started to tell Jason that after Wal-Mart we would have to go home to put away our groceries, but he insisted that after this we had to do the other errands. We tried to explain that we couldn't carry raw meat or frozen foods around China all day (especially when it's 100 degrees here at all times). He assured us it would only take a few hours, and we said that that wasn't the point.

This is a perfect example of the kind of thing that happens a lot here. I do not want to generalize, or be prejudiced here, but all of the Chinese people here that I've had any serious interactions with have a serious problem with thinking things through. Why didn't we come to Wal-Mart last? Why couldn't we go home first and then go and do the other things? Well, Jason told us that the answer to the latter was because the bus station and bank would be closing soon. Fair enough, the four of us thought, but that raised another question: Why did Jason insist on waiting around until after 3pm to start doing the errands that had to all be done before 5?

Eventually we reached a compromise when we learned that the last foreign teacher, a young fellow from England, had had the unfortunate luck of having his plane severely delayed. Since he too would need to go shopping and get a bank card and get a bus card, we decided to call it quits for the day and go back to the flat.

Laura and I spent the evening exploring the flat's nearby vistas. Despite Jason's insistence otherwise, we found a little supermarket just 3 or 4 minutes walk from the flat. Aside from meat and fruit, this store has just about everything else we could possibly want and is located much more conveniently. Nearly as convenient is the outdoor fruit and meat market just a block further down the road. I'm not sure that I trust the meat being sold at this outdoor market, but the fruit seemed good enough to buy in the future. Actually, most of the meat looked quite fresh. As in: it was still alive! It was fun and exciting to walk around and look at all the chickens and other birds for sale, as well as plenty of live fish.

The next day brought the arrival of our new British friend, and one of the longest days of my life. It should have been simple. All we needed was to open a bank account, get working Chinese phones, and to get a bus card. Somehow what I thought was going to take an hour or two ended up taking nearly 8 hours. We were on our feet for almost this entire time, and there was a lot of walking to and from different places.

The bank was the first part of the nightmare. Banks are known the world over as places of bureaucracy , and where happiness goes to die, but the Chinese manage to raise it to a different level. Even though Jason was there to help us fill out the forms, and the bank was essentially empty, it still took 2 hours to get 4 accounts set up. One of the reasons behind this is that we had to keep re-filling out our forms. The first time I was asked to re-do it was because I had put an X sign in one of the boxes instead of a check mark. The second time was because I wrote "Jonathan Krause" under the name for one thing, and "Jonathan Andrew Krause" another time. It was the most Kafkaesque thing that I have ever experienced.

After this we had to go get our phones, and once again we were beset by trouble at every step of the way. Despite reassurances on both sides of the ocean that it was a simple matter of replacing an American SIM card with a Chinese one, nobody's phones would work with the new card. This mean that, after over an hour at the SIM card depot, we now had to add an extra stop and go buy new phones (because we couldn't get the phones they sold at the SIM depot). Another trip to Wal-mart later, and it was time for the bus cards.

The bus cards were relatively painless in and of themselves, but at this point we were exhausted and sick of walking in the hot sun all day. That hot sun had already gone down and the end was in sight. It was around this time that Jason remembered we needed to go get pictures taken as well. According to him these pictures were for our visas and our physicals, and we were responsible for paying for them.

This did not quite sit right with me because I remembered having visa photos taken and a physical done before coming to China, at my expense the first time around as well. Everyone else was more than a bit annoyed because they were hot and sweaty and tired and did not dress for photos that day.

Nonetheless, we got the pictures taken, and we all paid for them in the end. It just wasn't worth the argument, and eventually I spoke to our supervisor and she assured me that it was for a separate visa. The first visa and physical were for entry into the country and staying for a year, while this one was for working for a year. Remember what I said about China and bureaucracy going together like cats on hot tin roofs?

A funny thing happened at the photo place, though, almost making the whole thing worth it. We were told when we arrived that we couldn't wear tank tops for our photos. This, of course, would have been good to know about 12 hours previous, but it was too late. One of our Michigan friends was wearing a tank top and he did not have time to go home and change. So the photographer guy gave him his shirt! His sweaty, way too small shirt! Just to be clear, this Michigan friend is well over six feet tall, and the photographer was just over five (and obviously was Asian as well).

We went home and more or less passed out, which was a good thing because the next morning brought us the PHYSICAL OF THE DAMNED.

This physical was in like a day-clinic place, although it appears that its sole purpose is for people getting work visa physicals, as there were no physicians on site. All of us foreign teachers were required to get a blood test, do a urine sample, get an X-Ray, do a vision test, get an ECG done on our hearts, and have an ultrasound. Why these tests specifically? What were the results? As of this writing I still have no idea.

The ultrasound was weird, because as a boy I never thought I'd have to have one done in my life. The jelly was cold, just like they always say in the movies. The vision test and the X-Ray were pretty normal, I suppose, although they didn't give me any sort of lead shielding before giving me the X-Ray. I assume I have cancer now.

Nobody wore any gloves or protective measures when they drew my blood. This still is freaking me out a little bit, although I am happy to report that I saw them take the needles out of the wrapping, so at least those were clean. During the ECG procedure, the nurse inspected my feet very closely. I wasn't sure what the purpose of this was, but I assumed it was normal. Afterward I talked to my friends, and nobody else had their feet looked at! Why was she looking at them!? Did they smell? Who knows. I know I didn't imagine it because she said, in characteristically broken English, "Time to look at the feet now".

The urine test was the strangest of all, because we had to go to the 4th floor to do it. We went alone (as in, no nurses), and when we got there the floor appeared to be abandoned. After we peed in the cups (which were the size of the cups that ketchup goes in when you go to McDonald's and decide to dine in), we had to leave the cups on this tray down the hall. The tray was already full of pee samples. They were all uncovered and unlabeled. It was like a hall of urine, and is definitely in the top 3 strangest things I've seen in China so far.

The next few days were pretty uneventful. So uneventful that I have literally no memory of what we did. It was during this time that Laura and I watched all of the last season of The Wire. It was really good, although we didn't like it as much as season 4. I could go on, but that's not the purpose of this blog, and I'm sure plenty of people have blogged about the wire a number of times already.

Thursday morning was our first day of "work". It was not an official day of work, because school didn't begin until September first (the day I'm writing this entry!). We just had to go, meet all the teachers, get our schedules and classroom assignments, and do all kinds of clerical things.

The school itself is very nice. I will put in a bunch of pictures on one of my next picture posts. It's enormous! Like the size of a city block, or maybe bigger. Of course, true to form, we learned that it is considered quite a small school in Foshan. "Only" 1600 students attend this elementary school.

After a tour, we had an assembly with all the other teachers. This meeting was done entirely in Chinese (fair enough), and was also 2 hours long (not fair enough). Also there was no Air Conditioning in the room (of course there wasn't). 90 minutes of the 2 hour teacher assembly was just the principal talking in one long speech. I actually think it may have been one long sentence, but I'm not going to lie I played backgammon on my phone the entire time.

This was also the morning that we met the final two foreign teachers. They were both holdovers from last year, so they did not need any of the errands run that we had been doing for the last few days. One of them is from Scotland and one is from India. They're both lovely. Moving on.

During the lunch break we scoped out another mall. They're everywhere here and, frankly they are all pretty much the same. This one was a little different because it was so big that it had an entire ice rink inside! On the third floor! Crazy. It also had a Starbucks inside, which was cool. Laura and I couldn't resist, and needed a pick me up anyway, so we got two frappucinos. These were the first things I discovered that were actually more expensive in China than in America. Two small fraps were over $12 US. They used real whipped cream though and, frankly, were worth it.

After the school day (which, no joke, had about 5 more speeches in it) we were escorted to this hotel in the middle of nowhere. We were told, only about two hours in advanced of course, that the city government of Foshan was throwing a party for us. Because the beginning of September marks the beginning of the Mid-Autumn festival, a very important holiday in China, and also the beginning of the school year, the government wanted to throw a thank-you dinner for all of the foreign teachers living in the city!

We went to a 5-Star Hotel in the middle of some of the most beautiful gardens I've ever seen, and had a delicious dinner along with over 400 other teachers, mostly from English speaking countries. I met some cool people from Ireland, as well as more people from England and Scotland. We ran into a few more Michiganders as well. Dinner was preceded by (you guessed it) a really long speech about the importance of getting a visa before visiting China. I found it strange that they decided to give this speech to us, seeing as we were already in China on the very visas that he was telling us we should get, but TIC, baby.

The best thing about dinner was the unlimited wine. The second best thing was the unlimited food. We had a really good evening and our group got to know each other quite a bit better than we had before. After dinner we went out for more drinks, for a game of pool, and for some more food (all anyone does here is eat; it's glorious). A few blocks away from our flat is a street, lovingly nicknamed "BBQ Street" by the English speakers, where hundreds of vendors come out every night and sell delicious and cheap grilled food. This is where I tried the chicken liver!

The weekend upon us, we had no more obligations until Monday. We spent the weekend doing more of the above. Laura and I specifically spent a lot of time cleaning our apartment, because it was disgusting when it was given to us. It is still disgusting, but it's a little less disgusting now I guess. We also went exploring at every chance we got. Foshan is many times significantly larger than New York, so there's basically more to see than can ever be seen and more to do than can ever be done. We've also gone out to eat several more times, and hung out with our new teacher friends a bunch. We also finally started working out again. After over a month off, it's been difficult getting our bodies moving, but it feels good to run! There is a several-mile long strip of park called "The green way" very near to our flat, so we will be using that for the near future. Our British friend joined a gym, but he says it's a nightmare in there, and that he regrets putting the money down already.

The highlight of the weekend, for me, was finding an honest to goodness Irish pub in the city! It's owned by an Irish guy, and it was pretty authentic inside. The food was good, and was also the first truly western food that we had eaten in over 40 days, making it all the better. Laura had a cheeseburger, and I had some stellar Shepherd's pie. We will definitely be making a pilgrimage back sometime soon. The bus systems, we found out too late, close down after 10pm around here. So, I also experienced another first by hailing my own cab, communicating in bad Chinese, and getting him to take me home! It was thrilling if not a little bit nerve wracking.

After a rocky beginning, I think I can safely say that I like Foshan just as much as Zhaoqing. There is still so much to explore, but I feel like we have a good baseline of a few miles around our house and our school. Of course, I'm sure I'm completely wrong. Just yesterday I found a street over a mile long that had people selling nothing but pets. Fish, birds, cats, dogs. It was a pet store alley and it was much closer than a lot of the streets I thought I knew well. Surprises around every corner, I'll tell ya. We still aren't sure what the deal is with Jason, our groommate. I've decided I like him a lot, though, and it's not bad having him around. He's helpful, nice, and generous. I just hope that in the future we break through his Chinese programming and actually get him to tell us what the deal is with when he will and will not be staying with us. It's also great making some new friends. In some ways it makes me miss my old ones back home ten times more, but it's been a while since I've gotten to know some brand new people, and it is fun! There's the added bonus that most of them are from cool countries I have always wanted to visit. Most of our conversations at this point revolve around how things are in their countries, or in the US, or how it's all so different from China.

I found an app that will help me to understand the bus line better, so once the next weekend hits, the plan is to go explore all the big touristy attractions in Foshan. Also on the list is finding some things to spruce up the apartment. I could be wrong, but based on my observations of stores, my talking to people, and my peeping around the few homes I've been into so far, it doesn't seem like Chinese people like to decorate at all. Laura wants scented candles, and we may have to travel pretty far too find some.

Until next time friends!

P.s. I'm sure some of you have noticed, but I want to address this directly going forward. Since I am talking about real people in my blog, but I am not getting their expressed permission to talk about them, I am trying to avoid using names as best as I can. For the Chinese people (i.e. Jason), it is unlikely that they will ever read this, since this website is owned by google, and thus blocked in their country. Also, even when I use their "real" names, I am not using their real names, since their English names are just names that they made up themselves. For all of the westerners I meet, though, I am trying to be respectful by not talking about them way too much. If I do use any names, they will either be made up, or used with their permission.