Here we are again with another week come and gone.
This is becoming an interesting challenge for me. My goal, of course, is to write a full blog post every week on Sunday or so without fail. I do this not only for my friends and family at home, but also as a personal writing exercise. I have always wanted to do more writing, and I think a few thousand words a week is a reasonable goal. It would be a very big accomplishment if I were to be able to have 57 full blog posts by the time my year and month in China is over. Should I manage to complete that task, I would have a firm backbone of an outline with which to finish my attempt at my book on these experiences, which is yet another life goal of mine. Finally, I want something to look back on in the future to help me remember the little things that may not be seared into my brain forever, and a fully detailed public journal is a good way to do it.
And yet it is getting more difficult finding things to talk about on here. Certainly a week is a lot of time to cover in a single blog post, and I am sure that no matter how much I talk about, there will be more that I forget to write down or more that I choose to omit than will actually make it into the final draft, but avoiding redundancy is getting harder every week.
Nevertheless, I will persevere, not just for myself but for all of my readers (all 15 of you)!
It's remarkable how quickly I am getting adjusted to Foshan. Today marks the end of the second full week here, and it already kind of feels like home. I was not sure I liked it here when we arrived, and after learning about how much farther away everything was, how many cockroaches we had to deal with (lots), and how crappy our bathroom is (very), I did not think I would ever like it here.
I was wrong! I like it just as well as I liked Zhaoqing, and maybe a little more so. It's nice to have our "own place" and to be able to do what we want with it. Having furniture and shelving is a revelation. Not having to walk halfway across town to a buddy's house with 15lbs of laundry in tow? Divine! Similarly, it's nice to have the freedom to put the furniture where we want and do decorate if we choose to. To be honest, however, decorating appears to be presenting its own challenges. I've peeked into some open doors in this building, and I've talked to several Chinese people these past few months, and it seems like nobody does any decorating around here at all. The only decorations people hang are Christmas decorations (which they leave up year round), or this festive traditional red paper stuff that they hang for Chinese New Year or the Mid-Autumn festival (they then leave this up year round as well).
Laura is on a personal crusade to find some scented candles and some little rugs to make the place feel more like a home, but we have had absolutely luck anywhere we have looked so far. I did some searching online and have learned that there's an IKEA in Guangzhou (which is 35 minutes away on the subway), so we may have to go there this weekend and take a look.
This week was the first official week of work. Our schedule is now Monday-Friday from 9 to 5:20pm, but it doesn't actually work that way. 9 to 5:20 is our "office hours", the time that we are required to be at the school. All seven of the foreign teachers teach twelve 40 minute units in a classroom each week, but we all have different schedules. So, for example, only have two classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I have four classes on Thursday. Laura, meanwhile, has only one class each on Monday and Tuesday.
The office where we work has two AC units, as opposed to every other room in the school which just has one. This makes it ALMOST LIVABLE. The office is shared with the whole English department, so in addition to the seven foreign teachers (I've just now decided that we are going to be forever known as 'The Nanhai Seven'), there are about twenty Chinese ladies in there. They are all pretty nice, but they are not all good at their jobs (more on this later). Jason, our groommate, also works in that office, since he is an English teacher.
Outside of the 80 minutes or so of teaching we do, the rest of our day we are free to do pretty much whatever we want as long as we are on the school grounds. Obviously, we have to make lesson plans for the class, but we have been provided with textbooks and teacher guides so this does not take much time to do. Commonly during the day I have been practicing my Chinese or reading on my Kindle.
The other foreign teachers like sports a lot, so sometimes after lunch they play basketball. Due to the intense heat of midday China (IT'S STUPIDLY HOT), and due to us wearing work clothes, these games are usually pretty relaxed. They usually just play Horse or a variation thereof. I am quite bad at basketball, owing to my long and wearied history of not being athletic and generally being a bookish foodie, but this is a year of me doing new things. I have joined them pretty much every day, and am starting to make baskets with relative frequency. A lot of the students like to watch us, which is both fun and completely embarrassing. They laugh at me occasionally, but I take solace in the fact that I'm older, better looking, and a foot taller than all of them. I could literally crush them if I wanted to.
The staff of the school is actually quite sporty. Jason says that the staff has all kinds of leagues and things, including a basketball team, a football (read: soccer) team, and a badminton team. Practices for these things is supposed to pick up in a week or so. I am hoping to be able to join some or all of these teams. We have still managed to go running almost every day this week, but I really do not want to lose all of the fitness progress I made in 2013 and 2014 by becoming a couch potato in China, so any opportunity to be healthy I will (literally and figuratively) jump at it!
Speaking of couch potato, our television was finally set up! This is so great. I haven't even watched any Chinese tv yet, but I've been able to use the HDMI cord and plug my computer in. We've been able to watch Big Brother on the gorgeous TV they gave us and it has been a real treat.
Jason, who still lives with us most of the time, does not get Big Brother or care for it too much.
Another thing that we get to do while we are at work is nap! The first time I heard this I scoffed at it, but it's actually really awesome. Just like in Zhaoqing, there is a 2.5 hour breaktime in the middle of the day for lunch and relaxation. They actually have some cots and some of those big blue gym mats in our office, and every day after lunch at least a few of us will take a quick nap in there. There is something really invigorating about being able to take a 20 minute power nap right as the 2 O'Clock tired feeling sets in every day.
So far, this school has been a really awesome place to work. The atmosphere is, as you could imagine, very relaxed. As long as we go to our classes on time, and as long as we have properly prepared for those classes, the other teachers and bosses do not care what we do at all. I've even been playing video games on my computer a little bit before lunch some days.
The classroom structure is way different from Zhaoqing. First of all, and thankfully, these are actual classrooms. Gone are the days of working on the floor in a mall. Nope, here in Foshan the students and the teachers get to have desks and chairs and everything! The classes are also much bigger here. Instead of 2-6 children coming in and sitting down, we have between 25-40 kids in each classroom. This was daunting at first, and learning the names of all 100+ kids I have between my 3 classes is something I have already considered giving up on.
The classes themselves are a bit hit and miss. It seems almost completely random as to whether or not the kids will behave or be going completely ape shit for the 40 minute session. At first I just assumed I had one 'good' class and two 'bad' classes, but by Friday my 'good' classes were being 'bad' and my 'bad' ones were being 'good'! It seems like who the Chinese English teacher is makes a big difference. Just like at Bosskids, each classroom comes with an "assistant" of sorts. However since this is a full school year and the kids have full schedules, the children spend a lot more one-on-one time with the Chinese English teachers, and it really shows which ones are good at their jobs and which ones aren't.
One of my classes I share with Jason, and he is simply fantastic. It has taken some getting used to after living with this guy for a week and seeing him basically be a goofy dysfunctional dude, but he shines in the classroom. He has those kids whipped into shape, and yet they all love him. the one day that they misbehaved for me was the one day that Jason couldn't be in the room. My other classes, though, are run by significantly less effective teachers.
One of my classes, run by someone named "Rose", is just a disaster (Again, referring to my previous post, any names I use are made up either by myself or by the Chinese people).
This lady is always 5-10 minutes late for the 40 minute class, and tells me I can't start teaching without her. Once she shows up she takes attendance for another 5-10 minutes before letting me begin. She then spends the entire class in the back of the room playing games on her phone. She points the room's single AC unit toward only herself, and ignores everything while all her children run around like the damned zombie apocalypse has begun.
So far she has only interacted with me twice. The first time was to tell me that I was not a good teacher because my lesson plan was "too hard" for the kids, even though it's the same lesson that my other class of children the same age had no problems with. When I asked her for specifics, she said "the kids don't know any of these words", which was hilarious because it was the part of the class where I was TEACHING NEW VOCABULARY TO THE KIDS. That was the whole point, them not knowing the words!
The other time was when she stood up and told me "class is over" ten minutes before class was over. I told her I needed to finish my lesson, but she said it was time for her to teach and that what she had to teach would take 10 minutes. This was frustrating because she actually gets class periods with them where I am not there, and after only one week I am already 2 full lessons behind my other 4th grade class!
So that can be stressful. Another stressful factor is that many of our classes are actually for the evening. Since this is China, and an expensive boarding school, they take their education seriously. The children have classes from 8am until 9pm every single day of the week. Their only breaks are for meals, the 2 hour nap time, and a gym class. This is basically the norm in China from the time you are 6 years old until you are graduated from college. What this means for me, though, is that sometimes my classes are scheduled for 6 or 7pm. Even on days when this is the case, I am expected to do my "office hours" from 9 to 5:20. Adding in the long bus commute to and from work, and I often have 12 hour days at the school.
They can get away with this because our contracts say we only have to work "40 hours" a week, but they do not say when those hours are. They also don't count the hour for lunch, the hour for dinner, and the two hour break in the middle of the day. So even though we have to be on the grounds of the school, according to them we are "not working".
Obviously, since we are allowed to do whatever we want for most of the day, including sleep, this isn't so bad. Plus, it's not like I would be doing anything else at home during these times. Still, it is really brutal on days when we don't get to come home and change out of our work clothes until after 9pm.
We are allowed to eat in the cafeteria on Monday-Friday for free. They serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but breakfast is usually finished before we get to school so I usually just eat at home in the morning. The food served in the cafeteria is far from extravagant, but I honestly think it's quite good. There is always a meat and two vegetable sides, and obviously rice. We are allowed as much as we want of everything (the rice is even self serve!). So far I have liked every meal we have been given. One day for lunch we had fish heads, and this is the meal I probably liked the least. The fish was actually quite good, but for some reason it wasn't served hot. Additionally, fish heads are really extremely bony (as most skulls are), so it was a pain in the butt to get to the meat, and when you got to the meat there was not much there. The two foreign teachers who are here for their second year are really sick of the food at the cafeteria, and so they usually go out for lunch. It's nice to know that that's an option, but for now I really like the free all-you-can eat meals.
This week has been a week of new foods for me, actually. After growing somewhat complacent on Zhaoqing, Foshan has offered some new opportunities for snacking on things. I have finally gotten brave enough to buy some food from the night markets around here, or "Barbecue Streets" as a lot of the foreign teachers call them. These little bazaars get set up every night and there are always people grilling/smoking all kinds of meats and vegetables. At the encouragement of Jason, I have tried chicken livers, chicken feet, and also an entire grilled fish. They just put the whole animal on a stick and throw it on the grill.
The chicken livers were probably my favorite. They were seasoned and cooked to perfection, and were the perfect sized little morsels of meat. They had a light hint of the signature liver taste that you taste when you eat liver, and it was overall very pleasant.
The chicken feet were spicy and tough to eat. For all the effort of getting through the cartilage and the bones, there was not a whole lot of meat on them. I almost want to say its not worth the effort. It tasted very good though, and I have found myself craving them on and off for the last few days. I can see why they are popular, and actually the amount of meat you get makes for a good sized snack. They are also super cheap. I could definitely see myself having it again.
The fried fish was just okay. It was a little overcooked and was far too boney. Still, I found myself enjoying it a lot more than I had originally thought possible when considering the idea of eating an entire burnt fish carcass on a stick. Fish eyeballs are something else I tried. They are not their own dish, but something that you just happen to get when eating fish heads for lunch or eating an entire grilled fish on a stick. I had seemed to remember hearing that "the eye is the best part" of the fish, although now looking back I can't begin to imagine where I heard that. It was not squishy or gross, like you would imagine when eating an eyeball. I was worried it would be like a jelly of some kind. Actually it was flavorless and a little bit hard.
Today (Sunday) I had some a dish made with frogs that was quite good. As is typical of most of the dishes here, it was a little bit soupy and brothy, although I don't actually think it was technically a soup. I'm not really sure what the deal was, because Jason wasn't with us. I have had frog legs once or twice in America before, so this wasn't a completely new experience. Still, it was a new way of having frog. The meat was skinned and chopped up, so it wasn't green or slimy or anything, but it was also not battered or fried as is the norm with frog legs in the states. Frog meat without any batter on it looks kind of weird and veiny. It tasted a little bit like a watery or a fishy chicken, which is something that a lot of people say it tastes like. Hilariously, I learned that one of the Chinese word for frog is 水鸡, which means "water chicken".
On a related note, I have discovered that Sichuan food gives me horrible day-long stomach-aches. This is a shame because it is spicy and delicious, and also very prevalent around here. It will be hard to avoid, but it is really not fun being sick for 24+ hours every single time I eat it. What I thought was food poisoning a week or two ago was actually just a particularly bad case of post-Sichuan belly rumbles.
Speaking of health related issues: I definitely have asthma now! I come from a family of asthmatics, but have never personally had any notable difficulty with breathing. BUT NOW CHINA.
I have developed a noticeable wheeze, and (warning: a bit of grossness ahead) some thick dark orange phlegm since moving to Foshan. None of the other foreign teachers, including the ones who have been here a year, have anything similar. I was starting to get worried, but the results from that bizarre physical from last week came back and I am the picture of 24 year old male health. The results of my ultrasound indicated that I'm pregnant with twins, however. After doing some research on the common air-born pollutants in China I have learned that one of the major side effects is exacerbating asthma symptoms in those who have it and those who have a predisposition to develop it.
So in America Jon is just a normal dude, but in China he is a wheezy inhaler-toking nerd bomb! Luckily Laura brought an inhaler from home. I've been using it and it has helped a little. I hope that it does not affect my ability to exercise and be healthy though!
Due to our over 40 hour work week, and adjusting to making a curriculum/teaching it, we did not do very much after work this week. Laura and I have continued to go running for most days, although we admittedly have not gone on days when we got home after 9. Cooking at our apartment has dropped down to a minimum, since we are provided with almost all of our meals. I still enjoy cooking Baozi though, and make a couple nearly every day. I rigged up our wok to act like a steamer and they have turned out pretty great every time.
Also on the home front I am happy to report that our little roachy friends have pretty much disappeared. We have recently purchased a load of cleaning supplies and given the entire place a scrub down like it has probably never received. I think that, and the fact that we leave one or two lights on every night has given the roaches a pretty clear indication that they are not welcome.
Friday was an interesting close-off to the week. We were scheduled to have a big assembly to finish the week and to officially inaugurate the school year, but there ended up being a brief-yet-torrential thunderstorm that caused the entire first floor of the school to fill with water. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but the school is built in such a way that most of the structure is actually outside. Only the classrooms are actually indoors, the rest is in this big open courtyard. None of the rooms flooded, luckily, but the auditorium area is in the open air section, and is at the bottom of a slightly degraded bowl-shaped area of the school. So: flooded. The assembly was cancelled, but they also did not make anyone go to class, since we had been planning on not having classes in the morning all week.
This twist of fate was followed by lunch. Angel, our boss, took all of the foreign teachers out for a meal. Guess what? It was Sichuan! Spicy bowel-destroying Fish Soup for everyone!
After lunch we had our classes and then were staring down a 3 day weekend. Monday is the Mid-Autumn Festival, China's second biggest holiday (behind Spring Festival aka Chinese New Year). Friday was also one of the Michigan foreign teacher's birthdays, so we had pretty big plans. But first: we had to get home with out 10 lbs of fruit.
For Mid-Autumn festival it is considered traditional to give loved ones/coworkers/etc the gift of fruit and/or Moon Cakes. Moon Cakes are these little cakes made out of salted eggs that are just okay. Seriously ask anyone who has ever had them, Chinese or otherwise, and they will all say "They are just okay". Nobody feels strongly enough about them to even dislike them. Anyway, since Angel didn't have time to bake us all Moon Cakes, and didn't feel like dropping a ton of money (Moon Cakes are expensive), so she got EACH and EVERY foreign teacher a CASE of kiwi and a CASE of Cherrys. So, Laura and I suddenly found ourselves towing literally 10 lbs of fruit on the bus ride home.
Shockingly, we've managed to eat almost all of the cherries in the last 3 days. The kiwis are a different matter... they are very tasty but they are much more work than cherries! The cherries came in this really fancy box that was very Chinese. Also in typical Chinese fashion, the cherries say "AMERICAN GROWN" on the bag they came in, but the box that is in the bag says "Canadian Cherries", and also very small in the corner they say "product of Chile". So I have no idea where these cherries are from but they were pretty tasty.
To celebrate our buddy's birthday, we took him to KFC for dinner and then out to KTV. Jason, in a move that is so very Jason, is the "Super Ultra Value VIP" at the nearby KTV place, so we were able to get an 20 person room completely for free, and then something like 64 beers for only 600 Yuan ($100 US). Split between the 8 of us, it was a very cheap and fun night. Our Scottish friend invited some other foreign teacher friends and they were pretty cool as well. The best part of the night (aside from the singing and drinking and dancing) was when we all sang happy birthday to our friend. Someone pointed out that between everyone in the room there was about 9 different languages, either native or otherwise. So we all took turns singing Happy Birthday in English, French, Spanish, Hindi, Cantonese, Mandarin, German (That one was me!), and even Estonian.
Our birthday friend seemed to have a great time. Well, we all did. So much so that Saturday we didn't do anything at all and just "recovered".
Sunday, today, we had big plans to go out and explore Xiqiao mountain, which is an enormous nature preserve and home to one of the biggest Buddha statues in the world (If you look up Foshan on Wikipedia, it is the main picture on the page). We got up early and had all of the best intentions. I meticulously mapped out the bus route using this awesome Chinese bus app that I have. We set out and boarded the first bus, which we road for over 40 minutes. After that we had to make a transfer, and this also went very smoothly.
Then the trouble started. Actually the trouble was pretty simple: The other bus never came. We were definitely in the right place. I checked and double checked my map app, my bus app, and even with a few people nearby. There was also a big sign near the bus terminal clearly indicating that the bus we wanted to get onto was supposed to come by every 10-20 minutes. Unfortunately we waited for over an hour and it never came. Jason was not with us, so we didn't know what else to do. We boarded the bus toward home and came back.
The most frustrating thing about this whole ordeal is the fact that we will never know what went wrong. Was the bus not operating today because it was Sunday? Was it not operating today because tomorrow is a big national holiday? Did we somehow misinterpret the sign? Did the bus finally show up ten minutes after we left? We will never know, and that is the worst part.
The day was not a total bust, though, we still managed to see some new parts of the city and to meet some nice people. There was an adorable old couple who wanted to practice their English with us. They had to be in their sixties, and they said that had just decided to learn English recently. They were awful, but still managed to get their point across, and they were so pleased with themselves. We also met a couple of 6 or 7 year old girls who similarly wanted to say hello to us and ask how old we were and what not.
I am not sure what tomorrow and the holiday will bring. I have spoken with Jason and he found a more direct bus route that gets to the mountain, although he has warned that it will be especially crowded because of the holiday. We may just sit around the house and watch movies, or we may explore more of local Foshan. We also may make a trek to Guangzhou and search for some elusive candles.
Either way I am sure I will report back here with whatever I find!
Another week and another blogpost done! Look for pictures soon.
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