Jinan September 17, 2010

Jinan

We arrived, we got picked up by a tall guy with a sign with our names on it. His name was Jonathan, our new boss. Mirror, (yes his name is mirror) a Chinese coworker was also there and he drove us all in a van back to Lisha Dasha, our apartment complex. Lisha Dasha is actually the name of a giant government building right across the street from us but it’s an easy thing to say that will get a taxi in the right place.

We got up to our apartment, they had one ready for us thank god. Another new Teacher, Karen, had to wait about two weeks for her apartment to be ready. Instead she just squatted in a different one which isn’t so bad, but she couldn’t settle or buy things or clean or anything. We unpacked, I took a shower, Jonathon got us food from this Muslim restaurant across the intersection, rice potatoes, egg fried rice, noodles with yummy spices, and yogurt. It was awesome and way too much food. We ate the rest for dinner later.

Everyone kept saying how clean the previous tenants were and how lucky we were to get their apartment. Well, on our second day we kept finding out how lucky we were. There was a stickiness to almost everything in the kitchen. We did have a lot of pans, plates, bowls, utensils, glasses and such but everything had to be washed. I picked up a random bowl from the cupboard and it had streaks of red dried food debris inside. That was enough for me to spend the next bit of time washing every single item in the kitchen as well as all surfaces and pretty much anything I could see. I guess that’s a good thing to do anyway but it was especially good here. I won’t get into all of the dirty things but there was quite a bit of mold growing in the bathroom and it’s not surprising because the shower is designed horribly. It’s right next to the toilet which is kind of gross because water his the toilet and then runs on the floor right next to your feet and then all of the water pools in the corner. The drain is actually behind the toilet so we had to buy a mop and every time we shower, we have to mop up all the water into the drain because the drain is higher than the moldy corner.

But, the apartment is free, and it’s roomy and has a nice bay window in the kitchen, internet, and laundry. So, it’s not a bad deal.

After the cleaning, we had two days of training. We met some of the other teachers. There are a lot of teachers here compared to Hess. I think, in all, there are more than thirty foreign teachers here. Lot’s of different nationalities, American, British, South African, Irish, Australian, Filipino.

Teaching has been okay, at first it was a bit stressful. We have close to twenty separate classes each week(end). Our working week is Friday – Sunday but I come in on Thursday too, to teach adults. The cirriculum is okay and there is a lot of time to play games and have fun. I teach 7 PC classes though and those are young kids, 3-5 and their parents are in the room with them to supposedly help control them but they don’t really by any means. Sometimes they might speak kurtly to their children but the really bad ones don’t listen to their parents anyway. So, there is not much discipline that goes on. I hate that, having taught that age in Taiwan for a year, my first instinct to be strict and mean, in a teacher way, give them a bad look and tell them they must behave, just generally scare them into line a little, which is good and necessary. Instead I have to be nice and pretend that their misbehavior is just kids being kids. It totally destroys any chance of setting up the teacher student dynamic which is ironic because my boss has repeatedly told me that the reason the parents are in the room is to help control the children because it’s too hard for the teachers to do it at this age.

But, I’m getting used to these classes too. It’s only been two weeks and already things seem routine.
Routines can be broken though as on my second weekend, friday morning, I got a call from Joe, the city director asking me to come and teach a recruiting demo at a public Chinese school. It was an unwelcome call but I was contractually obligated to do it, even though my recruiter told me I wouldn’t be teaching any demo classes. But anyway, so I had to get a taxi to Aston 2, find Andrew the Chinese teacher, and then he is supposed to tell me what lesson I’m teaching. When I got there he didn’t have anything planned and so he and I had to quickly brainstorm something together about animals. That was quite annoying. We then took a taxi to the public school. It was nice to get a glimpse of it, when I finally got in. The security guard looked me up and down like I was a bad and dangerous person. Andrew told me that in China they are very strict about who can come in and out of the school. We eventually made it in. it was a three story building with a hollowed center courtyard area that the kids used for recess. We waited in the conference room and were served loose leaf tea. A few people came in to get a good look at me. Nobody spoke any English. I think one person might of said hello, awkwardly. Mostly they just talked to Andrew. At one point a nice old lady came in all smiles and talked with Andrew for awhile while incessantly glancing my way. When she left, Andrew wiped his brow and sighed, saying that was the headmaster of the school. I had know idea. Teaching the demo was actually a lot of fun. There were 30 students so the energy was high. When we walked out the headmaster gave us a round of smiles again. Then, the funny thing is I had to go to a mandatory teacher training right after that. So, apparently I’m good enough to teach a recruiting demo but not good enough to be able to opt out of our unpaid and very unproductive weekly teacher training.

The City:

We’ve been slowly learning the city. There is no subway but everyone has been telling us how easy the buses are and they are, once you know where they go. Thank god, for that well know search engine that starts with a G and there public transportation program that tells you bus routes for anywhere and everywhere. Seriously how do they do it? If only they didn’t cave to something something I shouldn’t talk about.

I can take a bus to school now. Taxis are an easy option too and can take you most places for 2 or 3 dollars which is cheap but a lot for us to do all of the time with our salary of $700 a month. There’s a Walmart, KFC and McDonald’s but not much else western.

Down the old street near Walmart the street vendors were selling big insects on a stick. They look pretty gross even for me, someone who will notoriously eat crazy exotic things. I won’t even try that though.

Lot’s of restaurants have pictures though and we’ve learned how to say noodles (mien). Some of the other teachers took us to the Muslim Quarter (Jinan has a really high Chinese Muslim population) which is one of the best places to sit outside and eat Kebobs (chuanr). They have chicken wings, garlic and chicken, lamb, fatty beef, and other stuff. Plus, tons of beer. The crowd here likes to party.

A few days ago, Zack our neighbor and another teacher at Aston, took us to some hills just outside the city hiking. He goes there often and likes to wander. So we started wandering and passed a Chinese guy having a sit and a little fire. Then we got lost, double backed and passed him again, then did that again. He laughed and we managed to communicate which hill we were trying to climb and then the nice guy led us to the trail we were looking for, shook our hands and then watched us till we got out of sight to make sure we were going the right way. It was beautiful. (By the way, I think I can link to some photos but it might take me a few days to get it done so be on the look out) The walk was nice, we talked politics with Zack and looked at the beautiful scenery. He took us to a cliff face with many Buddhas carved into the side of it. A lot of them had been smashed though. We speculated that maybe it was done during the cultural revolution but I won’t say anymore about that. That was fun. An old couple up there let us use their hand fans to cool off as we rested at a stone table.

There is a city square called, I’m forgetting but something like – guanchang changcheng. That is most definitely not correct but everyone in my circle just calls it the square. After our Company dinner the other night, all of the teachers went to the square. Charl, the vociferous South African guy acquired two free kegs of Beer, beer he called the peoples beer, that weren’t drunk after the dinner and we just took it to the square and drank it amongst the crowds of kite flying, roller blading, toy plane flying, hanging out Chinese people. Several Chinese folks came up to the edge of our group and stood just to look at the foreigners.

There are culture markets too. The culture markets are kind of like the night markets in Taiwan but they sell old sculptures or swords or books or teapot and such. It was nice to see all of the old stuff.

There are also “eat streets.” I’m not sure who gave them this name. They’re just streets where vendors congregate and one can get a cheap meal and have a bit of a choice. There’s usually a place near every school.

We’ve been invited and have accepted to take our first vacation with some of the other teachers and take a river cruise up the Yangtze river for five days. It’s supposed to be nice and beautiful place and we’ll see the Three gorges dam. Can’t beat an opportunity like that.

Getting here September 6, 2010

We flew to Hong Kong first. Having been there on vacation last Chinese New Year, we felt very comfortable getting around. Just a quick train ride into town from the airport and then on the MTR and we made it to the Yesinn hostel, the best hostel in all of Hong Kong due to it’s cheapiness and wirelessness in the rooms. It made it possible to skype with Ben once while there which was really fun.

We stayed in Hong Kong for 3 nights and one of those nights we had to stay at the Hong Kong hostel which is actually operated illegally out of an apartment building or at least I think so. There was no sign for the hostel on the outside of the building so we just had to ring up on the intercom and then someone just buzzed the door open for us and we went in. There were papers up everywhere on the walls saying how any hostel type establishment that may be operating there was in violation of the building and city codes. They were almost 4 years old though so we thought we would risk staying there one night. It wasn’t so bad actually but the wireless didn’t work and we really needed to book train tickets. We managed it finally on the crappy slow and shared by the many other internet hungry hostelers PC in the lobby. We got tickets from Hong Kong Station to Guanzhou just outside the SAR

First order of buisness, getting Visas. We already knew we had to go to the China resources building, not the Chinese embassy so we looked it up, took the MTR, walked through a street full of stripper clubs, scoped out a Mexican restaurant (I think Mexican food acts like Chocolate on Jessica’s hormones because when she gets a wiff she becomes single minded in her hunger. We ate their after filing our visa paperwork) and then found the Chinese Resources building. We had to go through security when in order to enter. A metal detector and a bag scanner. I beeped the metal detector but they just looked at me and pointed toward the elevator. I must not be too intimidating. We filled out our visa application form, waited for our number to come up. It only took 2 hours, and gave them our paperwork. They needed a phone number in Hong Kong and we didn’t have one and the hostel’s number that was on our room key was a Shanghai number for some reason so we had to do a lot of quick rummaging in our bags after sitting dormant for two hours until I found a suitable number on some piece of printed out travel documentation that I had. I think it was our hostel’s number but didn’t care. The likely hood of them calling and us actually getting the call was very low no matter whose number I gave them. They didn’t say anything else to us either. It was weird. I was expecting some type of interview, or questioning. Nope. “Come back tomorrow at 3 pm.

We came back paid our hundred and eighty bucks and got our visas.
The day after Lucy, the person in charge of visa’s for Aston (the school we’re working for) e-mailed wondering if we got our visa’s because she heard that they didn’t do it anymore in Hong Kong. I’m glad that’s not the case as it would have put quite a hiccup in our travel plans. Kind of a vomiting out an internal organ hiccup. I think that would have been the end for us.

But we got em. And we used em. We stayed another night at the Hong Kong Hostel and then vamoosed out to Guanzhou which isn’t very far away. Oh yes, I forgot to mention. Being the savvy travelers that we are, we both forgot our pin numbers to our check cards which was our only source of cash. We both contacted our banks and parents and found out it might take a couple of days to get both of our problems fixed. So, the money we had was the money we had and it wasn’t exactly that much. And we could still use our cards as credit cards and just sign as we did in Guanzhou. We kind of got duped at the train station. The ride was nice. We went through customs fast, again not being asked anything. But when we got to the station this little man was standing there saying taxi. Our mistake was to say yes. The taxi was a minivan driven by a teen/adult with his girlfriend in the front seat. Second mistake: we got in without negotiating the price of the taxi. Then inside we were bombarded with pamphlets for hotels. Telling the man we already had a hotel he promptly upped his game, raising his voice a little and pulling out even cheaper deals that were not that much more than we were planning on paying. I think he could see our hesitation but we told him a final no. We asked how much for the ride, he said $150 yuan. We paid he got out, the couple put’er in gear and off we went. Half way there, their phone rings. Then the driver wants to give us an even better deal $200 for a 3 star hotel. We looked at the pamphlet and not being sure if our original place had any rooms anyway said, “sure.” About a minute later we realized that our taxi ride was costing us nearly the price of the room we were to be staying in that night. We’d been had. That ride shouldn’t have even touched 20 rmb so they made their money on us. But the room was nice and the floor manager helped us out in several ways through a lot of miming and his bad English and our even worse Chinese. And we were only talking about $50 dollars total anyway so it was a gentle learning experience for us.

Guanzhou was okay. There wasn’t much for us to do there. We only had one night and had to figure out travel plans. We got a meal and it was weird because everyone spoke Cantonese so we really couldn’t communicate very well but we managed to eat. I think I broke the t.v. by pressing too many buttons on the remote. It was all computerized and everything was a menu and I couldn’t get anything to work because it was all in Chinese. So, we watched Mad Men on the room computer instead.

The next day we took a train to Shenzhen, managed to get a cab to our cool artist area called the Oct loft located hostel. We stayed there for a few days, walked through a botanical gardens where we saw a praying mantis facing off with a bird that was trying to eat it. It was quite a sight. The bird never got it. That bug look pissed. I don’t think I would even want to step on it. It was up on it’s hind legs like a grizzly bear with all of it’s claws and pinchers out. Pretty scary. Speaking of bugs, here in Jinan we saw these bug kabobs at several street vendors tonight. The were big bugs about the size of my thumb, skewered maybe five on a stick. It looked pretty gross. I pride myself on my love of exotic food but that is something I don’t want to nor think I could try. I would have a hard time convincing myself it would be a good thing to put that in my mouth. Maybe it’s good though but the psychological ick factor was pretty overpowering.

Shenzhen was pretty low key for us too. Jessica managed to get some money though finally, which was good and we walked around a lot. But the fun really began when we went to Shanghai. I’ll briefly mention that I had a bout of traveler’s diarrhea from here on out that was quite unpleasant especially staying in hostel dorms with shared bathrooms and walking around looking for public squatting toilets all of the time. But that’s all I’ll say about it. I’m finally getting over it now.

Our train ride was 18 hours and it wasn’t that bad. We had hard sleeper seats which meant we had two small but adequate bunks in a little crammed area of six total bunks. Luckily we had one of the bottom ones and could store our luggage under it and sit on it like a seat during the day. Our bunk mates were all teenagers and all friends who liked to play board games. They weren’t so bad but did take up a lot of space when crammed down at the bottom playing games. Jessica said one of them was really smelly but I never smelled it. At night there were a couple kids yelling right next door to us and they kept running back and forth and back and forth and laughing at the same dumb joke. It makes me sad for all of the adults I used to do that too when I was a bad kid at that age. We made it to the food car though which was fun. It felt like being in a Hitchcock movie sort of, but no fancy dining sets or anything. Lots of people eating whole fish and then spitting out the bones right at the table onto the table. That was a strange thing to see. But what the hell. We had some “snow” brand beers and watched the beautiful mountainous Chinese scenery pass by then walked the gauntlet back through the tight space between beds through each car back to our tight space. It was about a five car walk.

The ride was eighteen hours but we slept a night through about half of that. It was awesome going to sleep, watching the mountains and trees go by. The geography wasn’t exactly like anything I’ve seen in America. It felt like I was in the Appalachian mountains but with much less vegetation and more loose rocks.

At Shanghai, we took a taxi to our hostel, located just off of Beijing street and checked in okay then went to buy our train tickets for Jinan to be able to tell the school our schedule. The ticket office we found sold only hard sleeper and hard seats, as opposed to soft sleeper and soft seats and they were all out of hard sleeper so we were going to have to ride hard seats for twelve hours all night to Jinan. Oh how we should have tried to change that.

Shanghai was like being in New York. It was huge and beautiful and everything seemed epic. The skyline view from the bund was amazing. There is a tower called pearl tower that is round and colorful and makes the city look very futuristic. And there are skyscrapers everywhere and buildings being built and people, man people everywhere. Our hostel was located right in the center of town, next to the river, sort of close to the subway system which is massive. We did a lot in Shanghai, mostly walking around, going to museums, we saw a Lamborghini and the guy driving could barely get our of it. It was only like three feet off of the ground. We found a lotus pond and went to the Shanghai expo. Yes, the expo. It is a giantly huge endeavor. A whole section of town is sectioned off for this thing. It’s like an amusement park. You have to buy a ticket, wait in a queue, walk a lot, then stand in more lines. We went at night when the lines were shorter, only a few hours or so. So, we didn’t end up going in any exhibits, just walking around looking at them. It was nice but it began to storm pretty bad and everyone started scrambling. People were freaking out really badly and what seemed like an over the top way. I remember standing on the first step of the bus waiting to get in when a family pushed past me, screaming very loudly god knows what, and this grandfather was pushing his grand-daughter’s head into me and when I got out of the way out of concern for her he just slammed past me and did the same to the woman in front of me. I guess they really wanted out of the rain. There has been a lack of structure when standing in lines. People regularly come up and stand right in front of us. I’m not sure if it is a lack of respect for us because we’re foreign Americans or that personal space is so much smaller here and any little space is a space to be filled or that that just the way they do things. At first, it was god damned annoying but now I find myself doing it too, at bus stops and such. I just cram in wherever there is room. It can be fun sometimes.

We took a boat tour across the river which was fun. The view is amazing.

When we finally left Shanghai, we had a train to catch at 11:58 pm which was due in Jinan the next day at 12:15 pm. With our seats it couldn’t have been a worse time. If we had sleeper seats we could have just slept. But, we had hard seats and when we tried to get on, there was a line into our car that was like trying to pour split pea soup down and already clogged drain. It was a twenty minute wait to even put our foot into the entrance to the train. Then when we finally got there the worker told us we should have been in our seats a long time ago because now the standing room only people were getting on. I don’t know how that would have been possible. So, with all of our luggage, we smushed through as best we could. Then people were in our seats up the way and there was no way to get to them, no way to tell them they had our seats, no where to put our luggage. It was a frantic pointing and telling people in bad Chinese that we didn’t speak Chinese before a woman came up and took our tickets and told us to cram our luggage into a little place on the top shelf where luggage should never go, started yelling at people to move around. Our seats were 19 and 20 but they just happened to be really far away from each other so this lady then started yelling at other people to move around so we could sit next to each other. All we could tell her was xie xie (thank you) and smile at her. Our seats were uncomfortable as is possible, made by people who are not human beings no doubt. They were straight up which meant we couldn’t lean back to rest. If we tried to sleep we would fall forward. So we had to lean our heads on the table for any rest and after about an hour it becomes physically impossible to keep that up without a muscle spasming resulting in waking up in pain. I think I did that twice which equals about two hours of sleep. The rest of the time was spent trying to find a position it took the least amount of effort to maintain. The crazy thing is we were in relative luxury on the train, as so many other people had standing room only tickets which meant they got no seat. They stood. I watched these people standing with bags and kids and other stuff, for hours. Most of them got off within 5 or six hours but that is still a hell of a long time to just be packed in. A lot of people sat in the aisle on the floor but that must have been awful too. Everyone seemed accepting though.

At 12:15 we asked (I’m glad we knew some Chinese) our seat neighbors if the stop was indeed Jinan and they said yes and we got off and Jonathon our new boss was there waiting.

note- WordPress won’t seem to let me post pictures. I’ll try to find another site that will and then link to them.