Week 11 has been significantly better for me than the last few have been. This is due in no small part to having some much-needed time off of work. Yeah, working last Sunday was definitely a drag, but that's in the past now.
Monday and Tuesday were (mostly) ordinary work days. I have loosened up a lot with my teaching schedule, and I think that everyone is benefiting from it. I approached the first month at school with a certain amount of zeal that I am now realizing was a bit too much. While it is true that the Chinese take their studies very seriously, and that we are teaching at a prestigious school, I have come to the conclusion that the English classes that I teach are not considered the most integral part of the curriculum. What I mean by this is that they don't really have any expectations for how I spend my time teaching the children, nor do they have much of an expectation that the kids have demonstratively learned anything. I have been, up to this point, working my way through the textbook in a timely fashion, and have been taking it very seriously. Any time that I have not been lecturing in class has been spent doing worksheets or doing review sheets.
After talking with a lot of the other foreign teachers, and getting the chance to see how a lot of the other teachers run their classes, I have concluded that I am pretty much the only person doing this. The other foreign teachers spend a significantly higher time playing games that have little or nothing to do with English at all, and spend a significantly lower amount of time teaching new materials. While I had looked down upon this during the first few weeks, it has become clear that everyone else is enjoying their job a lot more than I do, and that the students seem to like the other teachers a lot more than me, too.
I picked up on this a lot quicker with my younger children. All of the first graders that I teach are so young that they don't even really know Mandarin yet. Even though Mandarin is the "official" language of China, Cantonese is the official language of Guangdong province (which is where I live). Mandarin is taught in school, as it is the only language used in classrooms, but most of my first graders this year attended kindergarten, so they are learning Mandarin at the same time as I am teaching English. Add to this the fact that they haven't learned how to write in Chinese yet, and that before they are taught how to write the Chinese characters they are first taught the romanized Pinyin alphabet, and you can see how they have a lot on their plates. I originally started my first grade classes with the intent of teaching them how to read and write simple words and sentences in English, but it was almost immediately apparent that this was impossible. So now we mostly just play games that involve lots of running and screaming. It has taken me up until now to relinquish my more lofty goals for my 3rd graders.
I assumed that by grade 3, the kids should be a little more used to school, and that I could have higher expectations. I wanted my class to be fun, but I also wanted it to be clear that they were here to learn. Monday and Tuesday, then, were my first real attempt at doing things differently. I still did the normal lecture/worksheet spiel, but this time I only did it during the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the class. The last half of class was dedicated to a few different games. Spoilers: the kids freaking loved it. I think I gained back a lot of good will this last week. Sure, the kids may not be learning new material at such a stellar rate, but at least they don't hate me now. They were better behaved during the lecture period, too, knowing that we were going to have fun in a few minutes.
One game that they really like is called "Heads Up Seven Up". Some of you may be familiar with this. I had no idea what it was, but Laura suggested it and taught me the rules. Most of the kids in the class already knew what it was, and apparently it's a similarly popular game in Chinese classrooms as it is in American ones. In China it's called "Thumbs up" though. The rules are pretty simple, a handful of kids are "volunteers" and stand up at the front of the class. Everyone else puts their heads down on the table, closes their eyes, and has to be silent (which is wonderful). Once nobody is looking, the volunteers go around the room and each pick one person to tap, or in the case of China, pull their thumbs. Once they have all picked a kid and returned to the front of the classroom, the children who were "picked" have to try and guess, using no apparent information at all, who picked them. This game goes on and on for forever, and is a great way to pass the time.
The other game that proved very popular this week was "Letter Chain". This one is actually mildly educational, which makes me feel a little less guilty for playing it. So, basically, it is a spelling test. You divide the class into 3 or 4 large teams. You reveal a word, and they have to spell it on the board. What makes it a "chain" is that each kid is only allowed to write one letter. After writing their one letter they have to trade their piece of chalk off to the next person. If the kid wrote down the wrong letter, than the next kid has to use their turn to fix it. This game is fun, fast-paced, loud, and a quick way to make your entire classroom devolve into chaos. As I have mentioned here before, all of my kids like to cheat at pretty much everything all the time, and this game was no exception. I spent most of the hour catching and "punishing" kids for cheating by awarding points to the other teams. Also, since everyone is running around, this is also a great game that almost guarantees that someone is going to fall on their face and start crying. After 11 weeks teaching in China I have come to the conclusion that at least one kid is pretty much guaranteed to cry at least once per day, and so I have stopped avoiding games like this out of fear that someone will cry. I used to be afraid that I'd be the one to get in trouble if any kids got hurt on my watch, but it has not happened yet and I don't think it will happen at this point.
The other big news story of the workweek was that on Monday we had to go to the visa office again. This was supposed to be our final trip. We went "armed" with a whole host of things to ensure that the government would finally do it's job and help us out. In addition to me and Laura and Jason, we also took our boss Angel, as well as a government employee "insider". This fellow is apparently best friends with the principle at our school, and so whenever the school gets into a pickle, he helps out from the inside. We also took a giant fruit basket with us to bribe our way into getting everything taken care of. Once again we had to go and sit and wait at the government office for a few hours while essentially nothing happened. Our Chinese compatriots and the fruit basket did all of the "talking" for us. Laura and I didn't even have to sign anything this time around.
After a whole lot of waiting, reading quietly in the corner, and pushing the fruit basket around, we were finally done. Unfortunately we weren't able to leave with our Visas, but we were assured that everything would be finished by the end of the national holiday. In the meantime we were granted temporary visas. This means that we are no longer here illegally! Yay! It feels so good to be legitimate. The temporary visas also granted us the freedom to roam around the province as much as we wanted. We still aren't allowed to go to places like Beijing (which is in a different province), nor are we allowed to leave the country and come back. This little bit of compromise was really nice, though, after being trapped in Foshan for a few weeks. We went home from work on Monday and immediately started planning potential day-trips during our break.
The holiday, by the way, celebrates "National Day". October 1, 1949 was the day that the People's Republic of China was officially formed. So it's essentially like the 4th of July back home. The holiday is officially three days long, but it is always combined with a four day weekend, and is thus a week long.
In typical Chinese fashion, this whole "weeklong national holiday" thing has really messed up the school schedule. I mentioned this last week, but to reiterate my point I will say that in China there's no such thing as time off. Instead of just giving us the holiday, we have to "make up" the time we miss from work. This is why we had to work last Sunday. We also have to work another weekend in the near future. This is weird, but it ALLLMMOOOSSSTTT makes sense. Don't worry, China has thrown another twist in it to make it even more chaotic.
So, each day we have our set schedule. Monday is Monday's schedule and Tuesday is Tuesday's schedule, right? Some classes I see every day (like my 1st graders), but some classes I only see on a few days a week (like how I only see my 3rd graders on Thursday and Friday). Makes sense, I think. Well, what day do you make the Sunday, then? It may not be the most difficult question in the world, but you can see how this starts to complicate things. If I ran the zoo (and believe me I don't), I'd make sure that the days that we are missing (such as Wednesday or Thursday) were the days that we make up on the weekend. That's logical, right? Since we had Wednesday-Friday off this week, you would think that they would make the Sunday schedule match up with one of those days.
This is China, though. They decided to make Sunday into a Tuesday day. This means that my workweek this week was Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday. Why? I have no idea. When we get back to school next week, we will have another series of weird school days where Tuesdays are Thursdays and Wednesdays are Mondays.
Just in case you are about to get comfortable with this information, don't worry, there is another China twist. Some days, like Tuesday was this week, aren't even the same day all day. Tuesday, we found out, was a normal Tuesday in the morning, but for some reason was a Friday in the afternoon.
Okay, Jon, I can hear you saying. This is very confusing, but at least you were told with plenty of advanced notice and also given a written down schedule of everything, right? Nope. They told us on Tuesday MORNING about the weird schedule for that VERY SAME DAY. Also, the only reason they told us was because Chris asked our boss for clarification. If he had not asked about it they never would have said anything. Of course, when our boss explained Tuesday's schedule to us, she explained it in a very "of course this is the way it is, didn't you know that?" sort of manner.
Ahhhh China I love you.
So we finished with work and started our vacation. As I mentioned previously, some of our friends went to Guilin, while others went to Beijing. As of the beginning of our break Laura and I were sort of stuck. We thankfully were allowed, finally, to go somewhere without the fear of being detained, but we hadn't booked anything! This time off of work is due to a national holiday, which means that the entire country has had the time off. Everyone in China travels and sight-sees like crazy during vacations, and everyone increases the prices of everything significantly. The government allows holiday prices to increase by 15% legally, but in reality most businesses raise their prices by between 25 and 50%.
Since we hadn't booked anything, most ideas seemed prohibitively expensive. As such, I have used most of this break as time to catch up on my relaxing. It has been supremely nice to be able to be inside an air-conditioned apartment all day. I have really cut down on my daily sweat output. We have also used the break to do a lot of cleaning, reading, and practicing. I took an online test recently and, according to the results, I know roughly 150 Chinese characters now!
The whole week wasn't a total snooze-fest though. We spent a lot of time walking around and exploring new areas of Foshan. We found a new mall about 20 minutes south of our home. This sounds kind of lame but basically 50% of all buildings in China are malls, and when it's as hot as it gets here you have to spend most of your time in one. We also went back to the fancy outdoor mall where the Irish Pub is at and did more exploring in that region. We found a cool frozen yogurt place as well as a donut store. We'll be going back to the donut store soon...!
On Wednesday night, which was October 1 and the actual day of the holiday, we went to a nearby public park to celebrate with the Chinese people. I was hoping for fireworks, since that's what we do on our national holiday, and also because China invented fireworks. Unfortunately they did not set any off at the park we were at. We did, however, get treated to a live concert by a bunch of fun bands. They sang a bunch of patriotic songs that were really catchy, and because they were really simple I actually understood most of the choruses. This was a cool moment for me! I plan on trying to learn the rest of the words to these songs so that I can show off next time we go to KTV.
We also took two different day trips this week. This first one was to the Chimelong Safari Adventure Park in Guangzhou. It was a relatively short subway ride away, and it made for an incredible day!
Chimelong is the humongous resort on the outskirts of the city. I guess everything in China is pretty humongous though. China is really the Texas of Asia. Anyway, Chimelong is like Disneyworld. They have a bunch of hotels, as well as 5 different adventure parks for guests to check out. The park we went to is a gigantic zoo (more on that in a minute), but there is also a water park, a theme park, a circus, and something called "Crocodile World" which is apparently like a zoo but with only crocodiles in it. The whole resort boasts some impressive stats though:
-The Crocodile World, for example, has so many crocodiles that it accounts for nearly 70% of all the crocodiles (wild and in zoos) nation-wide.
-The water park is the largest water park in all of Asia, and in 2013 was the single most-visited water park in the entire world. They had something like 30 million visitors last year.
-The theme park features 10 roller coasts and, like the water park, is the biggest theme park in all of Asia
-The circus just kind of sounded lame, to be honest.
I definitely want to go to the theme park soon, since I love roller coasters. The tickets for entry were not cheap, though, and we didn't want to spend that much money in one week. The prices go down later in the season though, so we go around Christmas time. Similarly, the water park seems pretty incredible, but they are actually closed for the winter. That's right, they are only open from April until the end of September because the rest of the year is "too cold". I read the sign explaining this to me on Thursday when it was a balmy 92 degrees...
The idea of going to a zoo in China always frightened me a little bit. I absolutely adore zoos, and the Detroit zoo is one of my favorite places to hang out back home, but I have heard scary and terrible things about Chinese zoos. The Chinese people, as a whole, have not developed the sort of relationship with animals that much of the rest of the world has. The ideas of conservation and treating animals with dignity and respect are slowly and surely becoming a thing here, but there is several thousand years of Chinese culture and history to overcome first. Most animals in China are, first and foremost, a food source. Second to eating them, most of them serve a purpose (such as cattle). Beyond that, animals are just things to a large number of the population here. Things that would be considered animal cruelty are very commonplace here, and even though China is progressing and catching up to the rest of the world at an incredible rate, the zoos a are lagging behind the rest of that progress.
When I heard about Chimelong, however, I did some research. The Chimelong safari park, unlike most other zoos in China, was built with "international standards" in mind. It has also won a number of internationally recognized zoological society awards and honors. With this in mind, we decided to go and check it out on Thursday.
I'm so glad we went! The zoo was absolutely huge. It took us about 6 hours to get through everything, and we didn't even get to do the safari part! The safari part of the park was only for people with cars. If you wanted to ride along in one of the park's trams through the safari area, you had to pay a lot of extra money. Regardless of missing this one area, I still feel like we got our money's worth.
The habitats that these animals get to live in are gorgeous and big. The Chimelong zoo reminded me a lot of the Detroit zoo, except that it was much bigger. One of the first things that we did after entering the park was go to the nursery center. Here in this area you could take a peak behind the scenes at the park employees and zoologists as they gave care to all of the newborn animals in the park. This was so incredibly awesome to see. We got to see the state-of-the-art facilities, as well as some very cute baby animals. We got to see, among other things, a tiger that was only a few weeks old, and some parrots that were only a few days old. The parrots were really ugly!
From there we spent the rest of the day exploring, and saving the "best" bits for last. We walked through the monkey area of the zoo, which was also really fun. They had a number of different species of monkeys, most of which are native to China. In the monkey areas they were selling special "monkey food" that people could throw to the monkeys to feed them. I really enjoyed this because it ensured that the monkeys, while they were free to roam around their huge paddocks all they wanted, stayed pretty close to where we were. I also liked that they had special monkey food, since I was worried that the Chinese people were going to be throwing all kinds of stuff at the monkeys. There were very few, if any, barriers between any of the animals and the people, and I was not sure how people would behave.
After all the monkeys we walked through a "rain forest" area that had toucans, horn bills, and lemurs. This area was just like the Kangaroo area of the Detroit zoo, in that the animals were allowed to roam completely free and that the people could walk through the animal areas. After this was a similar area called "snake path", which was a reptile house but with the snake tanks all over the place. Not only were there snakes on the walls, but they were even on the floor and the ceiling too! There was protective glass between us, obviously, but it was still neat to get that close to so many large snakes.
Next we went and saw the tigers. Chimelong zoo as one of the largest collections of tigers in the world, and the single biggest collection of white tigers. In fact, 90% of the white tigers worldwide are the offspring of a single mated pair that originated at this zoo. The tigers were amazing, and I've never seen so many before. Despite there being so many, they were all given plenty of space to roam and be as solitary as they wanted to be. Many of the tigers were quite friendly with one another, though, and we got to watch a few of them play. It was just like watching pet housecats play, except these ones were thousands of pounds and had huge razor-sharp teeth!
Finally it was time to see the koalas. I had read online that Chimelong had a pretty large koala population, and I was extremely excited to see some! Koalas are one of my favorite animals, and I have never had the chance to see one in real life before. My expectations were met, and even surpassed. They had a special area where you could pet the koalas! They charged extra for it, but it was totally worth it. Koalas are as soft and sweet as they look, and they really do smell like cough drops!
Up next were the elephants. I've never seen an Asian elephant before, and they were so cute! Not quite as big as their African cousins, it was so much fun watching the elephants play with each other in the water. One of the zoo employees was feeding the elephants bananas, and they had been trained to spray water on the zoo spectators in order to receive the bananas as a reward. I got sprayed a little more than I had planned on, but it was still a fun experience.
The final place we went was the Panda exhibit. Chimelong is one of the only places in China that has pandas on display, and it actually has quite a large population. The zoo has actually made headlines recently because they successfully managed to breed some pandas. In June of this year a set of triplet panda cubs was born, something that has never happened in captivity. All three cubs have survived so far, and are apparently quite healthy. Unfortunately the cubs were not on display while we were at the park, but we still got to see a handful of pandas. They are so much smaller than I thought they would be! They are kind of small bears, actually. True to form, they were all eating nonstop the entire time that we visited them.
All in all, the day at the zoo was one of my favorite days in China so far. I got to see so many animals that I never thought I would get a chance to see in real life, including orangutans and of course the koalas! It was pretty expensive, but I just may have to go back again before I leave the country. I want to see those darn cubs!
The other big thing that we did this week was take a trip to Zhuhai. Before we had our whole visa ordeal we had really wanted to go to a coastal town called Xiamen because we heard they had nice beaches. Since Xiamen is not in Guangdong province, that trip did not end up panning out. However, Zhuhai is also on the coast, and was only a few hours away.
On Sunday morning we got up early and took a cab to the bus station. This was a pretty harrowing experience for us. I was nervous about the bus station because foreigners rarely (if ever) travel by bus in China. I knew before getting there that there would be absolutely nothing written in English, and also that none of the employees were guaranteed to be able to understand a single word of English. I knew that the bus ride was going to be a test of both my Chinese skills but also of my patience and my analytic skills. I would have said logic, but logic continues to fail me over here in this country!
The bus station ended up not being so bad. It wasn't very busy, by China standards, and the teller seemed to understand me pretty well when I said that I wanted two tickets for Zhuhai. There was a little bit of uncertainty when we were waiting at the bus terminal and we missed our "boarding time". The lady would not let us get on the bus up to and including the 9:00 departure time. I am still not sure what went wrong here, but we were comforted with the fact that everyone else who was waiting for the bus had the same ticket time as us, and also seemed quite impatient.
Around 9:15 we were all allowed to board the bus. There was another minor kerfuffle when we learned, the hard way, that people have assigned seats on buses here. Amidst a wave of confusion and somewhat subdued shouting we discovered which seats were supposed to be ours and we were off!
The us ride took a little bit over two hours, and it was another fun chance to get a look at the Chinese country side. I enjoyed looking at all of the farm land (which was pretty much all there was to see). The majority of the farming area was made up of these tiny little lakes. I am not sure what the purpose of these is, although my default thought is that it must be rice paddies. I don't know enough about rice, or farming in general, to make this claim confidently.
Around 11:30 we arrived in Zhuhai and found lunch at a place called "The Like Cafe".
Zhuhai is a town that is probably best known for being the town that you have to pass through to get to Macau. Similar to Hong Kong, Macau has a history being independent from China. After a long history of things that are not worth trying to explain now, Macau is now officially a part of China again. But also like HK, it is a lot more "free" than the rest of China. As such, Chinese mainland citizens who wish to visit Macau, and Macau citizens that wish to visit the mainland have to go through customs. This is apparently a long and somewhat miserable process, and for most Chinese people this process happens in Zhuhai.
Zhuhai is a pleasant little beach town in its own right, though. "Zhuhai" means 'Pearl of the Sea", and one of the most famous landmarks in the town is a statue of a woman holding a pearl. Known affectionately as the Zhuhai Fisher Woman (珠海渔女). This fine lady was our first destination in town on Sunday. The second destination was the coastal walkway road, which also has a cutesy kitschy Chinese name, "Qhinglǚ Nanlu" (情侣南路) or Lover's Road. This road goes on for a number of miles and shows off the coastline of the city.
Unfortunately, the coastline was a little bit disappointing. For one thing, Zhuhai is where the behemoth Pearl River finally lets out into the South China Sea. Because this area is essentially a China-sized estuary, the water is extremely murky and churned-up. The area just offshore of Zhuhai is also one of the busiest areas in all of the SCS, due to the fact that it's where mainland China, Macau, and Hong Kong all meet. As such there was a ton of shipping traffic and also a lot of construction going on. I think they are building a bridge between Macau and HK. Finally, even though it was a nice sunny day when we visited, the smog was somewhat thick and limited our outward view. All of these factors made the lover's walkway somewhat less romantic.
Still! We had a good time and enjoyed exploring a new area. Whenever something in China is not up to my expectations (which is essentially all of the times), I try and use it as a learning opportunity and a chance to see how other cultures live.
For example, all along the cost were large rocks. These rocks came right up to the walls where the walkway was. The rocks were covered in two things: tiny crabs and Chinese people. It seems that a popular pastime in this town is to collect up as many crabs as you can and, I assume, eat them later. While I love crabs as much as the next fellow, I did not think that these crabs looked very appetizing. They were black and extremely tiny. I imagine you would have to catch at least 60 or 70 to feed a family of 3. Nevertheless, children, couples, and the elderly were out on these rocks in force hunting for crabs. Laura and I enjoyed watching the families cheer with delight every time someone caught one.
Something else we got to experience was the wealth of tourists at the pearl lady statue. This was our first time in an especially touristy area during the national holiday, and it was absolutely mad. Hundreds and hundreds of people were running out onto the rocks trying to snap photos of the statue and of themselves. Everyone in China has these extendable pole things that they can attach to their smart phones now, which allows them to take pictures of themselves without having to ask a stranger or a friend to help. It was interesting to see, although I hope they don't stay popular for long.
Finally, after doing the couples walk and seeing the naked fish woman, we went to the beach. I had heard many horror stories about Chinese beaches being disgustingly dirty and also full to the brim with people. Standing room only would be an understatement, apparently. With this in the back of my mind, I was pleasantly surprised with how nice the beach experience was for us. The beach was quite clean, and while it was certainly booming with people it was not too busy. We found a spot right away, as a matter of fact.
This is not to say that the beach experience was not strange, or that it was not super Chinese, because it was definitely both of those things. Once again, I don't want to generalize and say that all Chinese people are like this, or that any of these things are essentially bad or wrong. All I'll say is that it was strange compared to my US beach experiences, and that everyone that I saw on Zhuhai's main beach was observing the following behaviors:
1. Everybody was either right at the water's edge or was as far back as they could be from the water. These people were sitting under the trees and in the shade. There was almost nobody in the space in between, which is why Laura and I could grab a prime spot so easily.
2. Everyone was wearing way too much clothes. It wasn't even the amount of clothes that they were wearing which I found odd, since China is still somewhat more conservative than America in the way it dresses. No, what surprised me was the complete and total lack of beachwear whatsoever. Everyone was fully dressed in their normal street clothes. Also, keep in mind that despite being in the high 80s that day, it is now considered "late autumn/early winter" in China. Most of the people I saw at the beach were wearing long sleeved shirts, sweaters, and jeans. I actually saw one young man in a full suit. The people that were "swimming" were just sort of standing ankle deep in the water. There were a few men who were full-on swimming, but they were just wearing what was obviously the underwear that they had happened to be wearing that day. Laura and I were the only people in bathing suits on the entire beach, and as such we were the least-clad people. This elicited a lot of stares, more even than we get normally for just being white.
3. Well, this is not entirely true. Children were swimming naked. Yes, that's right. Anyone under the age of 8 or 9 was wearing nothing but their birthday suit. Now I'm not stranger to the concept of letting little kids run around the beach with nothing on, but usually in America that behavior caps out at around 2 or 3 years old. Not so in China, apparently.
4. Nobody brings towels to the beach. Everyone was just standing around uncomfortably or sitting right on the sand. This is probably a pain later when they have to pick sand out of their THREE PIECE SUITS.
Either way we had a pretty nice time. We decided not to go in the water as it looked rather dirty, and also because the naked children causing a ruckus made us slightly uncomfortable. After a few hours, a rash of newcomers to the beach started taking special notice of us. In the course of five minutes we had no less than three groups come up and ask to take a picture with us. One group asked if they could take pictures of us hugging and kissing, which surprised us so much that we didn't say no. No joke, a queue was forming at the end. After a while it got really uncomfortable, and so we decided it was time to pack up and leave.
We meandered around town for a while and checked out a few shops. At one point we turned down a street that I have decided to name "cockroach street". This is because there were hundreds of cockroaches on this street. This was really weird for a number of reasons. Firstly, it wasn't like a gross back alley or anything, but a main road. Secondly, they were all HUGE and just out and running around in the daylight. These cockroaches, for whatever reason, had learned to live in the sun. They appeared to love the sun in fact. Finally, for every live one we saw, we saw ten to fifteen dead ones. This street was figuratively paved with cockroaches. I have no idea what attracted them to this street in such numbers, but I have since vowed never to return to that street.
We headed back to the bus station in the evening and enjoyed a lovely seafood dinner before buying a bus ticket back home.
Thus ended the majority of our week's "vacation". We get another two days off (Monday and Tuesday) before going back to the old grind. Don't worry, we have been informed that we have to work all weekend this weekend to make up for our time off, and we've also been sort of told that most of the days this week won't be the normal days that they should be but will be different days that will be determined later.
Still, we have a lot to look forward to. For some reason the Chinese people love Halloween a whole lot. It's not really celebrated in China at all, but in Chinese schools it's a huge deal. All of the next two weeks will be dedicated to teaching special "culture lessons" based on Halloween. I plan on showing the kids a lot of Halloween themed cartoons (Great Pumpkin, anyone?)
So until next week...
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