Week 27 Do Ya Love Dialous? or, Fringe Yet Fabulous Fashions

Good gravy, is it February yet?

In preparation for the oncoming winter camp, we have been given 10 whole days at work with absolutely no schedule. No classes and no responsibilities! We are expected to spend our time preparing for the winter camp, when we will have to teach 8 1-hour classes each day.

I think that Angel believes that this translates to 16 different lesson plans, but what she fails to understand is that the English language abilities of the students between grades 3 and 6 are all relatively similar. Sure, there are quantifiable differences in their abilities, but not enough of a gap to create special tailored lessons for each age group. Moreover, we are not teaching "English lessons" for the camp. We have all been given "fun" topics to cover at the camp, and it has been made clear that the expectation is for the kids to have fun and maybe learn a little bit, as opposed to learn a lot and maybe have a little fun.

Laura has been assigned the topic "Music". She is being really creative with it, and has turned her lessons into a quick crash course through the last 100 years of western music. Covering Jazz to Rock and Roll to Hip Hop and Pop, I think that the kids will have a lot of fun with her lessons.

Similarly, I have been given the topic of "Culture". Since I am a big foodie, I was originally going to talk about different ethnic cuisines all over the world. After a little bit of working though, I have decided to present the children with four "lesser known" ethnic groups in America. Since their exposure to the USA is mostly limited to movies and music, all of which gets put through a big government filter, Chinese kids mostly just know about America through the Transformers series and Taylor Swift.

With that in mind, I have designed four different lessons around the groups "African Americans", "Hispanic Americans", "Native Americans", and finally "Chinese Americans. Using these lenses, I plan on introducing the kids to some history they may not know, some movie clips from films they won't have seen, some more music to augment Laura's lessons, and most importantly introduce them to a lot of food and customs.

I picked African Americans and Hispanic Americans because they make up the largest minority groups in the country and yet the Chinese seem almost completely ignorant of either, at least from what I have observed this year. I picked Native Americans because they were the first Americans, and are another group that the kids have almost zero exposure to whatsoever. Finally I picked Chinese Americans because Asian Americans are another important ethnic group in the USA, but I thought that the kids would be particularly interested in people with a more similar cultural heritage. Also, Chinese people hate Japanese people.

It's true. It's one of the most accepted forms of racism here. In fact, there are still many restaurants and shops in China that have signs that say "No Japanese allowed". This is not true so much in Foshan, or in big cities like Beijing, but my coworkers have all been to places in China that forbid the patronage of Japanese people.

Obviously this is a bad thing, and those doors need to be broken down eventually, but I do not feel that it is within the scope of these light, fluffy lessons to try and change hundreds of years of prejudice...

The segment of the winter camp lessons I am most looking forward to out of everything is the one on American Chinese Food. It is so fundamentally different from Asian Chinese food that I think the kids will be genuinely perplexed. It's also become a topic of interest for me as of late, and I've done a lot of reading on the topic. The cuisine that Americans think of as Chinese is the product of over 100 years of Chinese immigrants doing the best job they could with a severe lack of money and a total lack of the necessary ingredients. The result then got tailored over the century into what sold to Americans. I think it's a cool distinction that I hope the children can appreciate. I love both Chinese food and American Chinese food, and it's strange to live in China and miss "Chinese food" nearly every day.

Why not "white" or "European" or "Caucasian" Americans? Mostly because I think that the children at this school are already exposed to this quite a bit. Most of the foreign teachers that get hired at schools in China are white Americans, and the majority of the media that comes here from the US features white Americans. Even this year, all of the culture and Holiday lessons that I have done have focused on my family and my culture. So I thought this time around I would do something different.

So yes, the work involved in making roughly 4 lesson plans over the course of 10 days failed to fill up the workweek very much. Even having to share a computer with Laura only added a few hours to the total work time.

It's been a struggle to pass time in the office. We've been taking longer lunch breaks, and by Thursday and Friday we just went home after lunch. During the few hours we were in the office we would play games and joke around. This may sound fun, but it has been extremely tedious.

Lacking any real work to do has caused me to have some small existential crises in 2015. What am I doing here? Am I really accomplishing anything? I'm not making much money and I'm also stuck at this office so much that I don't even get to travel around as often as we were led to believe would be possible. Was it a mistake coming here? All of my colleagues and classmates who graduated with their MA when I did already have jobs, connections, and seriously decent payrolls coming in. I am falling behind the curve and I am forgetting probably more than I ever learned about Psychology in the first place. B.F. Skinner who???

My Chinese studies still continue, at a slightly slower pace now that our schedules are so wishy washy. This week I hit the 400 character mark. Theoretically I can now read roughly 45% of all Chinese writing. Sometimes I feel like it, too, like whenever we go to restaurants. Other times, such as when I am commuting to work on the bus and I pass the same sign for the 5,000th time and still can't read it, I feel as though I still have so far to go.

In an effort to bolster my own self-study, I located a woman who has a Masters in English and in Chinese who is based in Guangzhou. She gives lessons either in-person or on Skype, and she seemed really nice. She gave me a freebie lesson and I enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately her rates are quite high, and because the holiday is coming up I did not book a second lesson with her. Perhaps after February I will look into her again.

Friday was our first night at KTV in nearly 5 months. That's all I have to say about that.

Sunday we took a day trip to Kaiping with Leon and Zac. This was an interesting one. Kaiping is known primarily for one thing, which are the Diaolous. Essentially there are thousands of mysterious and strange towers littered all over the countryside surrounding Kaiping and Kaiping county. The UN dubbed them a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007, and since then they have become a bit of a tourist attraction.

Surprisingly enough, though, there was very little information on Kaiping beyond that. My usual websites and guidebooks that I use for planning Chinese adventures all came up blank. Even the wikipedia entry for the towers was sparse, scarcely mentioning more than their honorific title as the only Chinese UNESCO entry for 2007. In fact, I only discovered their existence while looking through the 2008 edition of a China Lonely Planet travel book that our coworkers on the 7th floor have in their library. Subsequent LP editions leave out the Dialous.

So, not only do the towers look cool and mysterious, but they seemed somewhat unknown outside of China, and there was a dearth of information on the subject to be found in books or the Internet. I KNEW I HAD TO GO.

Kaiping is only about 100KM from Foshan, so we got up bright and early on Sunday and departed. The bus ride was largely uneventful, although I learned that Kaiping is better known in China for its faucets. I kid you know, for 20 minutes as we drove down through town to get to the bus station we passed only stores selling faucets. Easily a thousand stores! I thought it would never end.

We got off of the bus and were immediately hounded by men on bikes and men in vans offering to take us to the Diaolous. In reality we did want to hire the services of one of these guys, but our first priority after the bus ride was to find lunch and to find a bathroom. I am starting to get used to pushy guys in China, trying to get you to choose their cab or their tuk tuk or their bike, but I have never dealt with a group more pushy and in your face. They actually chased us down the street. We were all shouting "NO" and "GO AWAY" and "DON'T WANT" in Chinese at them and they still would not give up.

Finally we found a KFC and went inside. Luckily we were not followed in, but a dude actually waited just outside the door for us! He watched us the entire time we ate! It was super creepy and unnerving. This is how horror movies begin (or end), I thought to myself.

After downing some mediocre chicken (it was the only choice! All the other stores were sink stores), we had a quick dialog with one another. Did we want to hire this guy? He seems creepy, but we  ultimately need to get someone to take us to these places. The Diaolous are all over the place in Kaiping. Once upon a time there were over 3,000, but estimates now indicate that there are still 1,800 or so. While it's possible to take a taxi or public transport to the various towers, my research indicated that hiring a dude with a van was the best choice.

Okay, we agreed. We would not go over 400 RMB. $60 US divided by 4 people for roughly 7 hours or so of schlepping us around seemed reasonable. We agreed to lowball the guy and really haggle. *deep breath* time to make this happen.

We stepped outside and the guy was suddenly much more friendly. He offered to take us to all 4 major clusters of towers as well as something called "Movie city", and then he offered to do it for 300. We were so shocked at how much lower his offer was that we just said "okay fine" and we got in his van.

Still a little nervous, the crew of 4 foreigners kept an eye out. There are plenty of stories of scam tours in China, the kind where the driver agrees to take you to somewhere, but makes a pit stop at a rug factory or a jewelry store. These stories do not end violently or in a scary way, but they usually end with foreigners being forced to pay through the nose for low quality counterfeits and knock offs.

Just to ease the tension here, I want to assure you all the nothing bad happened. In fact, we had a really great day, and by the end of it we really liked our driver. I think he enjoyed that we were polite and that Leon and I knew a little bit of Chinese. He most likely also enjoyed the fact that he made 300 RMB for what ended up being only about 5 hours of driving us around. At that rate, he actually made more money than we usually do at our teaching job!

The towers themselves were stunning. The history of the diaolous is really interesting, and is tied in with American history, as a matter of fact. In the 1800s, a large number of Chinese immigrants came to the USA to seek their fortunes. Some of them actually managed to make a killing the in the California gold rush and decided to move back home.

They came home heroes. Millions of dollars richer, and with knowledge of new kinds of food, fashion, furniture, and ideas, these trans-pacific Chinese returned to Kaiping county and started building mansions for themselves. These mansions fused Chinese and Western styles, both inside and out. They were built extra tall, not only to be show-offy, but because a lot of the villages in the area had trouble with roving bands of thieves and bandits. The returning Chinese families built their mansion towers in such a way that they could keep guards on the top and protect the village from future interlopers.

Since then, some of the towers have been continuously lived in, while others have been abandoned. Now that they are UNESCO sites, though, they are being protected and a lot of them are being refurbished.

The towers are, as I've said before, literally everywhere. Driving around the Chinese countryside is fun enough as it is, and is always a welcome break from the dreary gray of the city, but driving around Kaiping and seeing an architectural oddity every few minutes takes it to an interesting new level.

The four main clusters are all in these protected ancient villages. You have to pay an admission to get into them (or get the 4-Village-Discount-Ticket!), but once you are inside it is like stepping back in time. The villages are quiet, serene, and beautiful. Unlike a lot of other things I have seen in China so far, nothing about these villages seems fake. The people who live here are hard at work tending to their crops or carrying water to and fro. Chickens run wild everywhere, and in the larger fields Asian water buffalo can be seen.

We knew from the moment we stepped into the first village that it was going to be a challenge to leave again. The peaceful atmosphere of the Zili village was just so captivating!

This first site had about 6 towers in it, and 4 of them were explorable. From the outside these monoliths feature faded concrete in a variety of colors and also Roman-esque pillars. The one guidebook that mentions them talks about how the Diaolous blend western and eastern design, and it's definitely obvious when you see one up close.

From the inside, it is like visiting Greenfield Village. The homes are perfectly preserved with period furniture and knick-knacks. Family photos on the wall give the place a sense of history.

I will say that, by the end of the day, after having entered about 15 Diaolous, we get a little sick of them. The exteriors were all different and beautiful, but the interiors were all the same. I am not sure if it is a result of the UNESCO people just filling them with the same time-appropriate stuff, or if the families that once lived in them all went shopping at the same place.

Something we never tired of was the view. The view from the top of the Dialou is what kept us going inside each and every one and climbing 7-8 flights of stairs to the top. Seeing the Chinese countryside from that vantage point, without almost any smog at all, was something I will never forget.

Other things on the tour were interesting for different reasons. The "movie town" was a major let down. Apparently 1 movie was filmed in Kaiping. Just a single movie, once, back in 2011. They left all the sets up and have turned it into a big tourist  trap. At one of the ancient villages there was a starfruit orchard. It was completely free to pick as many fruits as you wanted in the orchard, provided you had paid for entry into the village. Watching the Chinese people take advantage of this "free" fruit was the ridiculous. People had 2, 3, and sometimes 4 garbage bags absolutely full of these things.

I picked one just to try it, and I have to say it was pretty tough to stomach. Basically it tasted like a waxy apple-flavored warhead candy. I almost retched on how sour it was. The tour guide/driver dude was REALLY into these starfruit. He kept pointing and saying "starfruit" in Chinese over and over.

All in all it was a really good day, and a big recharge for the month. There is only one week left until our big trans-Asia tour! Suddenly it feels like there isn't enough time to get the few last-minute things that we need done.

Finally, Laura went to a hair salon and got her hair cut this week. She was a bit nervous because of the language barrier, but she printed off a photo of what she wanted and it all went pretty smoothly. Her hairdresser was named Kiki. She knows that because it was just about all the English he knew, and he told her about 6 times.

Chinese hair cuts also come with a complimentary finger massage, and when they wash your hair you get to lay on a massage chair. Laura said that the massage chair was built for Chinese-sized people, and also was very intense. She literally is covered in bruises from the chair. But, like everything else in China, it was really cheap. She got the whole thing done for about $12 US.

Pictures up soon, folks!

Week 26 Picture Post

Some nice things... And some goofy things

We found a wild snake! I didn't eat this one...

This is what our mornings look like. Fully dressed, coats on, blankets on, and space heaters facing us. Drinking coffee in silence. Even though it's 55 degrees outside, these buildings are freezing! Is the winter over yet?

The pagoda!

The view of the city from the base of the pagoda.

Looking down from the top floor!

You can jussssttttt barely see our school from here!

This fellow was wearing a three piece suit, and then also crappy 

Some wood art in the pagoda

Delicious sugar cane!

Yummmmmmm

Friday lunch is best lunch

Week 26 - Dead Rats and Live Wires, or, No Longer Living in a Safety First World

And so, a little bit richer and a little bit wise.... well, mostly just a little bit richer, we can officially bring the Zhaoqing chapter of our life to a close.

Was it worth it? I'm not entirely sure. The added paychecks are certainly quite nice. Working just 6 days with them allowed us to take a trip to Taiwan, as well as financing most of our pending trip to Southeast Asia. On the other hand it was a pretty miserable gig, and one that I essentially had to drag myself to every week. I really disliked the students at this school, and I did not form any kind of connection with the staff either. Even more so than in Foshan, one get the impression of being taken advantage of. Perhaps worst of all, this position has forced me to give up having any real semblance of a weekend in two months. When you only have a finite amount of time in a foreign country, having to give up a large percentage of that time to babysit crappy kid who are even more unwilling to learn than average is a pretty raw situation to be in.

True to form, this last week in Zhao was absolutely insane. We were told a week ago that we would have to do "demo lessons" for some parents this week. No, further instructions were not provided. I was, however, informed a few days later that I was going to do a cooking demo.

"Cooking? Great, I can cook",  said to this little waif of a woman. Even by Chinese standards Betty was pretty small. If she hung upside down on some monkey bars for a few hours and really stretched herself out she may have been able to reach 5 feet tall. Maybe.

"Fantastic!", she said, "Then you will have to make sushi".

"Uh.... I don't know how to make sushi", I replied.

"Do you like it?"

"Sure, I love sushi".

"Well", she said with a huge smile, as if everything had been solved completely, "you must be very good at making it then".

So dumbfounded was I by this leap of logic that I just let it go. How does someone even reply to that? When dealing with the clearly enormous language and cultural barrier that is at play, a barrier so big that it allows Betty to think "Jon enjoys eating sushi so therefore he's clearly a veritable sensei when it comes to cutting and preparing raw fish in the traditional Japanese style", I have finally learned to leave things be.

After arriving in the somewhat provincial town of Zhaoqing for the last time, we took a final stock of things in our second apartment. This apartment, which I have mentioned used to belong to a guy named Arby who got deported, has sort of been our home away from home since December. Laura and I jokingly call it our summer home (THE JOKE IS THAT IT'S THE WINTER! DO YOU GET IT?). Arby left behind a lot of crap, and now that we knew that he was never allowed to come back to China we felt that the only appropriate thing to do was to steal pretty much everything we were able to.

Before shouts of "uncalled for!" and "you dirty rotten scoundrels!", it is worth noting that this is pretty much standard fare around here when this sort of thing happens. By the time it was clear Arby wasn't coming back, a lot of the Chinese teachers and nearly all of the foreign teachers had come over and picked over his things. Back at the end of December we showed up to the apartment one night to find most of the stuff missing. It was really confusing, not to mention upsetting! It was a damn good thing we never kept any valuables there.

Also of note is that the school "purchased" a lot of "new things" specifically for Laura and I. I felt that it was morally acceptable to hang onto these things since they were supposedly obtained for our benefit. After discovering  that a lot of the things that they claimed were new were not new (such as the disgusting crumbling mattress), and that a lot of the other things were straight up stolen (such as the comforter with the security tags still on), we felt justified in taking whatever we wanted back to Foshan.

In the end we got away with some pretty high quality olive oil, lots of cleaning supplies and shampoos, a life-saving space heater, and a single pillow. I wanted to take both pillows, but in the end only the one would fit.

After taking stock of the things that would come back home with us, we went to bed and prepared for our enigmatic "demo lessons".

As it turns out, the demo lessons were actually quite straightforward. For one of the 40 minute periods during both the morning and afternoon shifts, the parents of the children were going to come and observe the lesson. This is, at least on the surface, a method for allowing the parents to see the kind of education their kids are getting and to ostensibly feel a lot better about the serious cash they are dropping to get their kids a leg-up on the competition (read: about 300 million other elementary school aged people in the country).

This too, has a feeling of scam about it. I was told slightly ahead of time that I had to teach the kids a lesson that they had already learned before, and was encouraged to pick a lesson that they knew extremely well. The children had apparently been rehearsing all week in an effort to appear like they knew more English than they actually did. For the first two 40 minute classes of the day, I "taught" my demo lesson about 5 times. It was rehearsed like a play, and the assistant teacher Betty made sure that each student was able to answer their questions and that everyone looked like a little genius. I was made to promise not to ask any questions that were not well-rehearsed. At the same time, it was made clear to me that I was supposed to treat all of this like a brand new lesson.

To put it bluntly, the school was trying to fleece the parents. The school wants the parents to think that all of the children are little geniuses who are learning at such a high level that they already know all the answers to all of the lessons, even ones they haven't heard yet. The demo lessons had to include several elements of the "features" that the school offered, including text book learning and audio-visual materials. We were expected to do things that we NEVER actually do with the kids, just so that the parents feel as though they are getting their money's worth at this $100+ (USD) per day training academy.

It is not the first time that I have been made to feel like a bit of a worm in China, but it is definitely the most slimy. Going back and forth from both schools for 2 months as really highlighted just how much worse the kids in Zhaoqing are at, well, everything. They are paying more money for a much worse education because the school in Zhaoqing has a better facade and less competition. I lightly make fun of my school in Foshan pretty frequently, but any given child who is 9 or older is actually quite competent at getting their ideas across in English. In Zhaoqing, children in the same age cohort are absolutely floundering by comparison.

One of my 8 year olds in the morning literally does not know the English alphabet. He gets through A, B, and C and then just falls apart. For the demo lessons, we rehearsed the word "apple" with him about 50 times, and then the Chinese teacher told him that any time I called on him, he should say apple. Like a little performing seal I went along with this ruse, and every time I asked a question to which the answer was apple, I called on little Ken.

The sushi portion of the demo lessons went very smoothly. Surprisingly enough, it actually IS very easy to make sushi. Betty made a brief power point about how to make sushi, which I was supposed to "teach" to the students and their parents, but it was decently made enough that I was able to follow along just fine.

Of course, they didn't have any traditional sushi ingredients. For this I am somewhat thankful. I'm not sure I would trust this school to buy fresh, quality fish and then to also store it in a safe way until it was needed. No, instead of fish we had sausages and cucumbers. So very traditional! China has a lot of great food, don't get me wrong, but sausages are not something that the Chinese make well. Luckily the soy sauce and the rice and the cucumber blocked a lot of the stale, preserved, rubbery taste of their bland and crappy sausages.

The parents were impressed. I was originally only supposed to do the Sushi demo one time that day, but it went down such a storm that our boss asked me to do it again in the afternoon. Not too bad for someone who doesn't actually know how to make sushi, eh?

A weird incident occurred during the afternoon session. Before doing the sushi demo, I had to fill time for about 20 minutes. What we had decided on (and rehearsed) was that I would "teach" the kids some basic food words such a "mango" and 'hungry". One of the words that I taught the kids was the word "full". As with all of my other lessons, I teach vocab words to the Zhaoqing kids by showing them photos. Since we do not get much assistance from the Chinese TAs, and since my fluency in Chinese is not yet strong enough for me provide written vocab lists, pictures is often the best way to get a concept across. For the picture "full", I showed a woman holding a bowl of food. Her face was down-turned, in an expression that clearly indicated "I do not want to eat any more of this", and her stomach was a little bit bloated. All in all the picture was, if I say so myself, quite good at getting the point across. I had shown this slide to my morning class, as well as my kids back in Foshan. Everyone so far had gotten the intended meaning, and no incidents had occurred.

In the afternoon class, however, the slide came up and everyone freaked out. All the students started giggling uncontrollably, and the parents all averted their eyes, clearly embarrassed. Something about the photography was apparently inappropriate. I've been thinking about it for several days now and the only conclusion I can reach is that the woman was wearing a tank top which meant that her shoulders were bare. I've been told that this is occasionally considered inappropriate or rude in Asia, although barring this potential situation I have never come across someone actually taking offense to bare shoulders. In fact I see young Chinese women with tank-tops on all the time in the summer. I suppose I'll never know. At any rate, I quickly moved passed that slide and had to distract my audience with another topic.

Bus rides to and from Zhaoqing were always very strange. There's a bus every 30 minutes departing between the cities, so you would think that things would be consistent. These drivers, you tell yourself, have probably done this run a thousand times. No room for unexpected things.

This was never the case.

Buses frequently were 20-30 minutes late. They also departed early more than once. How can this country get anything accomplished when the bus you bought a ticket for leaves ten minutes early? The bus ride is supposed to take roughly 2 hours, but absolutely zero of the twelve journeys we took lasted that long. We were always an hour late or an hour early.

Something that happened almost every time we went to ZQ was that we would stop for gas at the scam station. I call it the scam station because it was located less than 10 minutes away from the final destination. Why couldn't the bus driver just drop us all off and then come back for gas? Because, you see, when we went to the gas station we were forced to get off of the bus and wait in a "waiting area" for half an hour. This waiting area has a little convenience store inside of it, with snacks that are marked up a good 300% from what they are normally priced.

The rides home were never worse, per se, but they were always different. I think we had the same driver every single time. He drove like a maniac! Slamming on the brakes left and right, I memorized a few Buddhist prayers to say every Saturday evening as I clung to my seat for dear life. One time, I kid you not, this bus driver PULLED OVER AND PICKED UP A HITCHHIKER! He looked like some kind of hatchet-wielding serial killer. Haggard is a word I do not use often, but it is one that I will apply judiciously here. I did not do any napping on that bus trip, I'll tell you what.

Speaking of picking up random hitchhikers, I feel as though China has become so much weirder since 2015 hit. I don't know what it is, maybe I just got lulled into a false sense of security these past few months, and am just starting to notice it again. Whatever the cause for my shock and awe, I have seen some crazy things this week.

The weirdest thing might just be the baby that we saw while out for a jog last week. We were on the "greenway", one of the public walking areas in the city. Lately the greenway has lost some of its charm. The water levels have gone down a lot, since winter is the dry season, and the sludgy mud that has been revealed in the canals smells absolutely foul. Additionally, now that we do most of our exercising in the afternoon we see a lot of teenagers who are on their lunch break. They like to make fun of "fat Americans" who are out running. Obviously the solution is to ignore them, but one can only take so much ridicule before it goes to one's head. It's not very fun to go running anymore.

But anyway! This baby! So the other day Laura and I were out for a jog and we saw this baby playing along the pathway. We could not tell what the baby was toying with, but as we got closer our eyes widened with horror. Low and behold, the baby was playing with a dead rat. No, I don't mean he was standing near it or poking it with a stick, he was full on playing some imaginary game with this rapidly deteriorating corpse. Where were his parents, I hear you asking? Well, they were right there. The mother was looking onward at the baby, fondly aware that her baby was having a nice time playing with this free toy. I wanted to scream! I wanted to cry! I wanted to snatch that baby away so fast. What is the best thing to do in this situation, though? Never mind the language barrier, where does someone even begin to explain to someone who thinks that it's okay for their baby to play with road kill that this is not a good idea? I just shook my head and kept running, perhaps a little faster than before.

A close runner up for most zany observance this week as the man clipping his fingernails and toenails on the bus. No, it wasn't some nervous tic where he bites his nails (something that I still struggle with). This dude had nail clippers with him and was fully going to town on his hands and feet. Human debris was flying around everywhere; he made no effort to collect the leavings. This is my life, people.

Sunday after coming home from Zhaoqing, Laura and I went to explore the giant pagoda in the center of town. Looming over us like a smaller and more Chinese Empire State Building, on a clear day you can see the pagoda from most locations in the Nanhai area. We had never been to the pagoda before. Leon, one of our coworkers, mentioned visiting it a few months back and saying that you couldn't get very close. The whole area was apparently under construction.

Throwing caution to the wind, and with little else better to do, we decided to check it out. We got lucky! The park and the pagoda itself were no longer under construction, and were open to the public. Leigang park is one of my new favorite places in town, for sure. Lots of beautiful green spaces, and not too crowded despite being a newly opened tourist attraction. I definitely plan on going back soon.

The park had no admission fee, and neither did the pagoda. We spent about an hour climbing stairs and exploring the grounds. We ended up at the very top of the big Chinese monolith looking out on the city. Even though it was slightly smoggy (what else is new?) the view was actually fantastic. It was the best and most comprehensive glance I have thus-far been able to enjoy of the city I now call home. We even managed to spot out some other city landmarks from our high vantage point. Look! There is our school! Oh, there is that KFC we go to sometimes! Even the loud, annoying Chinese children that were hanging off the railings and screaming 8 stories down to their parents couldn't ruin the mood. Well, they did ruin it a little bit. I mean, eventually we just couldn't take it anymore and we left in a huff. Before the huff though, it was a great time.

On our way out of the park I decided to check off another item off of my "China Bucket List", and I bought a stalk of sugar cane. These things sell like hotcakes all over the place. It has to be one of the most popular things for street vendors to sell, at least in Foshan, Zhaoqing, and Guangzhou. Something about gnawing on a huge plank of what is essentially wood had kept me from attempting it up until this point, but after climbing the pagoda and feeling, for the moment at least, especially Chinese, I went and bought some.

It was so unbelievably delicious! A little bit like chewing on a honey comb, eating sugar cane has somewhat of a learning curve. There are parts of the woody pulp that cannot be chewed down or digested, and ultimately have to be spit out. On the other hand. the stuff that you can swallow is perfection. Extremely sweet, cold, and terribly refreshing, I truly think sugar cane might be my new favorite snack. A precursory glance around the Internet indicates that raw sugar cane and raw sugar cane juice are extremely healthy in modest portions, which is just another reason why I'll be munching on this a lot more often from now on.

The work week did not yield too many noteworthy stories this time around. We were informed recently that the last 2 weeks in January would be spent preparing for a "winter camp", and as such that all of our classes were cancelled. I suppose that means this past week was my last week of classes this semester. It did not end with any sort of hoopla. Most of the classes this week were cancelled last minute as well, because the kids needed to study for some exam they were taking in another class.The semester is not going out with a roar, but a whimper.

One thing that did happen, though, was grading day. Since the entire student body (nearly 2000) took an exam, there were a lot of papers that needed grading. Not only did they cancel all of the classes for the foreign teachers so that the students could take the exam, but they also recruited the foreign teachers to help grade all of the papers. So, on Thursday afternoon the seven foreign teachers and about 30 other Chinese teachers all piled into the communism room (have I mentioned the communism room before? No? I'll talk about it next week) and spent 2 hours speed grading.

I know I sound like a broken record here, but it was insanity. The communism room is extremely echoy, and the 30 Chinese teachers were all SCREAMING at each other the entire time. There is no such thing as "indoor voices" in China, and whether you are 6 inches or 6 miles away from your friend, Chinese people talk with the same volume. I took my ipod and my headphones with me and blasted some tunes as loudly as possible, but I was absolutely unable to drown out the cackling of 30 gossipy Chinese women. Between the smog and the noise levels, Thursday gave me one of my worst headaches yet.

The grading actually went by very quickly. The teachers design the tests so that they can be speed graded. All of the questions are arranged in columns and rows, and then the answers are selected so that it can be marked up at a glance. For example, on the pages I was grading, column 1 was all TRUE, column 2 was all FALSE, and column 3 was all TRUE. Obviously this brings the validity of the test into question, since I imagine it does not take a genius to figure out the system and to just answer the questions in a geometrical manner, but who am I to judge? I'm just a big dumb foreigner.

With the image of an echo chamber filled with screaming Chinese ladies stuck firmly in your head, I will now take leave of this blog for the time being. Tune in next week where I talk about life-threatening smog and the creative ways to dodge boredom when there's absolutely nothing to do at work for the whole month!

Week 25 - I See a Lot of Weird Stuff, or, Back to Basics

So much for updating more than once a week!

I have already failed in that resolution, it appears. The good news is that I have followed through on some of my other goals. I am going to have my ramblings published in a newspaper! The University of Detroit Mercy Varsity newspaper has decided to start a twice-monthly column chronicling some of my travel experiences. I'm very excited about this, and hopefully a little bit more exposure will lead to some more readers over here. I've also signed up for some Mandarin lessons from a professional Chinese teacher. My self-guided study is still going well, but I think I've hit a wall. I want to get much better at Chinese in the new year!

It appears that the suck of January reaches even the farthest corners of the Earth. It's been remarkably depressing around here lately! The cold feels like it is here to stay. December and January are the only truly cold months in China, but this 60 day stretch feels never ending. The days are starting to get longer, but it is still generally dark by the time we get off work.

The short days belie the length of our work days, which only seem to get longer. January has been the month of abrupt schedule changes. Even abrupter than before. Our Oral classes have been moved around more times than I can count, and have now officially been cancelled for the rest of the semester. Our other classes have also been moved around and are frequently cancelled. We were just informed the other day that there will be a winter camp before the February break, and in order to allow us enough time to prepare the camp lessons all of our other classes have been cancelled.

In effect, this means that the foreign teachers have absolutely zero classes to teach until January 28th, but we are still required to come into work from 9 until 5:30 every single day. AND JUST SIT HERE!

Muppet Treasure Island, one of the greatest films of our generation, had a musical number in it about Cabin Fever. Well, I have cabin fever, and it's a lot less fun than the Muppets would have you believe.

The only reprieve from this is the hallowed halls of my fantasies regarding the February break. This almost seems like a legend. It seems too good to be true. Can we really have a month break from all the insanity?

China culture has really been grating on me this week as well. The little things that I found cute, funny, or fascinating for the last 6 months are now the most annoying and grating things about life here.

Phone conversations, for example. Everyone is on their phone all the time here, and no one can be quiet. Constantly shouting/screaming into a cell phone is basically a national pass time. More generally, the volume of China is at a constant 11.

Car horns, jackhammers, singing, cell phones ringing, children screaming from joy, children screaming and crying. These are the soundtrack to my day-to-day life. The symphonies provided by Helen, Melody, Yoyo, Bingo, and Spider are unique and varied but they are always grating. As many of you know I have suffered from chronic migraine headaches my entire life. Well, let's just say that China is no headache cure-all.

But, February beckons. Today marks the almost half-way point of January. I know I can do this!

A break is really all I need. After 6 months I don't know if I can say that I truly understand Chinese culture, or that I have become one with it, but I do feel that I have become a part of the rat race. All of those problems I tried to leave behind at home have found me again, and the sheeny glint of a far off foreign lands have given way to the smoggy grit of a "home sweet home". 1 month of traveling and seeing new vistas will completely reinvigorate me, I can already feel it.

Plus, once I come back I am hoping that all of China will be like new again. After a month of hiking through sweltering jungles and seeing things I never imagined I would see in my wildest dreams, the comforts of my home away from home in Foshan city will once more feel like a welcome reprieve.

Week 25 was one purely of work for Laura and I. Thanks to our agreement in Zhaoqing and also because of screwy scheduling in Foshan, we worked for 8 days in a row, and most of those days were 10 hour days. I did not have much time to explore, or even much time to reflect. As such there is not much more to report in this travelogue.

It is worth noting that we have finally made the decision NOT to renew our contracts in China. I am sure my family back home will not be happy to learn, but Laura and I had been seriously considering staying abroad for a second year up until very recently.

I know a lot of what I write on here seems like complaining, but that is truly just my writing style (this week notwithstanding). In all honesty I have truly cherished my time in China, and it will definitely leave an indelible mark on my soul. Between the once-in-a-lifetime experiences and the halfway decent pay (at least by Chinese standards), the idea of staying an additional year has been an attractive one for much of our stay here.

However, despite the warm feelings, I cannot help but feel like the bad will finally start to outweigh the good in a second year. I can already foresee the things that are just now starting to grate on my nerves taking a turn for the worse. By the end of a second year I would just be a calloused and bitter expatriate, something that I never ever want to be.

So what does next year bring, then? We are not sure. We both love traveling and seeing the world. They say to do it while you are young, and we are still young if we are nothing else. We may go to another country and set up shop as teachers once again. Finland, for some reason in particular, appears to be calling my name through the murky mists of the futures that could be.

Most likely though, and much to the relief of our relations, we will return home for at least a few years. China was an abrupt and much-needed change in my lifestyle, but I cannot forget that I left a lot of business at home unfinished. Oh year, and a big old mountain of debts unpaid.

One thing is clear though, I intend to keep posting on this blog throughout. While it may not be as big of an accomplishment as the book I hope to one day write, and overlooking the fact that I am usually quite behind on my own personal deadlines, I have successfully posted a few thousand words on here every single week for 25 consecutive weeks now! That's a pretty big deal in my book, and my book is the only one that matters, right?

I may not be the most original or entertaining writer in the world, but at the end of the day when someone writes they are writing for themselves. Keep a journal long enough, they say, and the journal begins to keep you. I think that is a good thing. I look forward to a day in the future when I can revisit these hallowed pages and remember all the fun times I've had with people taking poops in the street and with 104 degree days and with eating fish eyeballs.

Stay tuned for more cold fish heads and rock hard beds!

Week 24 - Forgetting Auld Acquaintances, or, How Not to Gracefully Throw In the Towel

New year new me!

My resolution this year is to spend more time writing. The original goal was to update more than once a week, and to get increasingly in-depth on various subjects. While I certainly have a lot of opinions about what I've been experiencing, and have a seemingly endless well of events to report on, I fear that this blog has more-or-less become a simple summary of the things I do or see every week.

Sure, I somehow manage to regurgitate 5,000-10,000 words per week, but going back and reading some of my own post reveals a lack of that desired depth.

So: Resolutions for 2015:

1. Write more often! Once a week does not seem to be enough, even if my weekly posts are long enough to make up for the gaps between

2. Do more 'specialty' posts. Some ideas I have so far are doing a post summarizing all of the bizarre nonsense I have eaten in China, doing a post featuring a minute-by-minute replay of how I structure my classes, and doing some more practical posts.

3. In line with the last bit of number 2, I want to expand this blog's purpose to include actual practical advice for traveling around mainland China. Bus numbers, restaurant names and locations, etc.

4. More Chinese! I've found that the phrasebooks that I spent a pretty penny on before coming here have been largely useless. If someone finds this blog and reads it, I want them to be able to learn some actual phrases that they will use every single day.

So, in the spirit of the new year, and because I've all my missed my own self-established deadlines for posting this week, I am going to keep this one short and sweet! I'll even try to write another post in a few days.

This week was very quiet. We returned from Taiwan and had another very short week. With all of our oral classes cancelled, and most of our other classes rescheduled, the foreign teacher crew just sort of took it easy.

We all only had 1 or 2 lessons this week, and I personally didn't even get to see all of my students. With such a ramshackle schedule it seemed pointless to start anything new, but with Christmas over there were no more holiday lessons to give. The resulting classes were a mixture of review and just random time-wasting type stuff.

It's frustrating when you want to be a good teacher, and when you want to teach an entire language to these children, but then outside forces get in the way. Most damningly is when the outside forces come from the school itself. I know enough about children, and remember being a kid well enough, to know that if you have 5 days off of school, then two days of school, then five days off of school again that you are not going to remember very much about the lessons during those days sandwiched between long fun breaks. The time was better spent having fun and building rapport with the class, and reviewing a few older topics.

Our New Years Holiday was, as typical in China, sort of a misnomer. They "gave us" January 1-3 off, even though January 3 was a Saturday and we would have had it off anyway. Also, since they were "giving us so many days off" they scheduled us to come and work a full day on Sunday the 4th of January anyway. What a joke! I'm completely used to this by now, but it doesn't make it any easier.

New Years came and went with a similar lack of hoopla. I came down with one of the worst migraines of my life during the day (I blame the pollution) and went right to bed after work. I almost slept through midnight! Laura managed to rouse me from my slumber in time, though, and we watched the New Year's ceremony in Beijing up on the 7th floor with some of the other boys.

This was my first NY away from the US. While that knowledge caused a bit of a stir in my emotions, after surviving Christmas and Thanksgiving away from home, New Years did not cause nearly as much of an upset.

Our Saturday was spent working in Zhaoqing, where I had a lovely little breakdown. As wonky and goofy as Foshan is, Zhaoqing is even more ridiculous. No resources, smaller classrooms, children that have even less of an interest in behaving. It's just so much worse. After 4 weeks of driving all the way out there to work on one of my days off, I finally had it. Our "boss" has been trying to weedle her way out of paying the amount of money she agreed to pay us, even though we are doing her a huge favor and covering for a person who was deported because of a mistake that she made. Four weeks of BS and now they don't want to pay us? I announced that I was quitting on the spot. Right in the middle of the day.

It was a total lapse of professional judgement, and I am embarrassed to say that I really lost my cool. It was only with the sound judgement of Laura and our Greek friend/coworker Hercules that I was able to calm down and see reason. We negotiated with our boss and got her to officially agree to pay us, and I was able to reassure myself that we only have to do three more weekends there. I won't be happy about it, but I can do this. I am not a quitter (although I nearly was for just a second there).

January brings a lot of work and not much else. Thanks to our part-time situation in Zhaoqing and also our "You have to work on Sunday to make up for all the lost time that this holiday affords you" situation, Laura and I are working for 8 straight days through to January 10th. It's really just a big countdown to my birthday for me, which signals the beginning of the month long February holiday.

We are also choosing to forgo a lot of our usual expenditures this month in effort to save some money before the big drip. So not only are we working more than usual, with no reprieve in sight, we are also choosing not to go out or buy any snacks or go to any restaurants for 30 days.

Wake me up at the end of the month!

January 5th was my 4 year anniversary with Laura. We celebrated by taking a very brief break from our "don't spend any money" resolution and going out for dinner. It's hard to believe I've been with her for 4 years. I'm still sort of surprised she was willing to come to China with me for a year, for that matter. It was a big commitment, and I am thankful that I have had her full and total support as always. Living together in a foreign country for a year, with only one another for friends/family/company is a huge leap for any relationship. We are literally the only other people we know for several thousands of miles. We have each other out here and that's it. It has made us closer in a lot of ways, and not just because our whole first month was spent in a hotel room where the toilet was 2 feet from the bed.

If you can find a partner in life who is willing to travel around the world with you, sit on 14 hour plane rides with you, eat snake and stinky tofu with you, and be the only person who can deal with all of your idiosyncrasies, then I think you've found a keeper.

Here's to another four years!

Ps. Only one picture this week (told you it's been quiet).

This is China in a single picture. Every day from 12-2:30pm, the entire country has a siesta time. Everyone DROPS to the ground wherever they are standing like some sort of sci-fi movie. This dude couldn't even make it to the shaded bench area that was 5 feet away from him. At least he took his shoes off.

Week 23 Picture Post

Santa Races

An orange juice squeezing vending machine!

Christmas Lunch

My lunch was VERY fresh

While we didn't eat them, the restaurant also had turtles on the menu

And snake

And lobster

This is the computer that the school's TV channel runs from. Scary.

TV Star

The formal gift machine

Did you prepare YOUR sock for presents?

First view of Taiwan

Bus ride into the city. Mountains everywhere!

Night in the city

We found it!

Waiting for our table

This was a little bubble baby

Here we are...

The lady who shared the shaved ice with me

My chicken curry dinner

The toilet in the toilet restaurant. Space aged!

I'm a tourist! This map is for me!

Penis cake store

I found Drugg Street!

Snake restaurant

Three snake shots. The blood, the bile, and the vodka

Ready to drink some blood and bile and stuff

Soup and fried snakes

Bruce Wayne wears chocolate apparently 

Early mornin' mountains

The subway car to the hotsprings was weirdly fancy. They had these Harry Potter moving pictures and everything.

Huge steamed buns for breakfast! Thanks 7-11

Hot spring river

The source!

Smells like farts

Sneaky shot of the hotsprings

Let's see some animals

Some alpacas

Woodchucks

Laura mimics the beautiful woodchuck

This helpful diagram shows how baby koalas happen

Shy panda

Love this

Happy 100th Taipei Zoo!

Insectorium!

Stickbug

 

At the zoo, these monkeys have gotten really good at stealing food from passersby

Tapirs are surely the weirdest looking animals

A sun bear!

Even the zoo was poo-obsessed

Lemurin'

I CAUGHT THIS GUY POOPIN

The most hippos I ever done seen. These guys had a huuuuge complex, and yet they all chose to hang out right here.

Who has the longest neck?

Nevermind. Pengolin's are the weirdest animals

Ready to go up the mountain!

Mountain top

Tea and other things being grown

Tasty snacks on the mountain top

nomnomnomnomnom

okay thanks

Don't look down!

Hello Kitty may be Japanese, but she is downright inescapable in Taipei, even in a gondola

Dinner at Whalens

POUTINE PLEASE

Nice tree Taipei 101

Longshan Temple at night

Stinky Tofu: On this episode of "Things in Jon's Mouth"

Delicious delicious oyster omelet

Everyone hangs out at 7-11. Youngs. Olds. Everyone.

There's a LEGO themed Restaurant in Taipei. We unfortunately weren't anywhere near it during opening hours, but I loved their storefront.

Cute lantern-filled street near the hostel

Longshan Temple

Inside the temple

It's weird that there's cash registers and a gift shop in here.

Look at those gorgeous pillars

The bus on the way to the Museum did not, unfortunately allow birds

No photos allowed at the museum, but I was sneaky!

This little Buddha was made in 500 BC!!! HOLY CRAP

Line for the cabbage. Goes around the entire 3rd floor and down the stairs.

Yeah this sure looks like it's worth waiting 2 hours for

The museum from the outside

My favorite work in the whole place.

This store was full of those little coin operated toy dispense things you see near the exits of supermarkets back home. THAT'S ALL THEY HAD.

This is the Presidential Offices in Taiwan. Basically the "white house" of this country.

Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall

You can see how it was inspired by the Lincoln Memorial