The Great Hall

Cc and I got to go to the Great Hall of the People last night for a Foreign Experts Reception celebrating the 60th anniversary of the PRC. When I first got the text from my boss inviting us to go I totally dismissed it. I had been pinged to do a bunch of random things that week (without pay) and figured this was another thing like that. When I told cc about it, she felt the same. But when we told our friends, they were like "You don't get invited to go the Great Hall and NOT go!!" They said it's where the Chinese government welcomes high officials. (President Nixon, too). I had already missed the deadline to tell my boss we would like to go, but she called me again anyway.

It was pretty fun, and definitely the real deal! We heard the vice-premier of China speak, who - if everything happens as it should - will be the next president of China. After he finished (in Chinese) I leaned over and asked my boss how she liked it and she said not at all, that it was 'too political.'

It was good spending time bonding with my boss. She's a little older than we are, and cc and she are starting to gel. During dinner she was surprised that I knew the name for Kungpao Chicken in Chinese (which, btw, sounds basically the same as it does in English). I didn't bother to tell her it's everywhere in the Bay Area. ;)

The one really funny thing of the night was that I wasn't supposed to take pictures. Apparently I didn't get the memo that cameras aren't allowed in the hall. But the security guards didn't take it away when I passed through the check station - and yet they took cc's knitting needles! ...? :) I was taking pictures in the first main hallway when my boss came over and told me to put it away quickly, that I would get into real trouble. I did what I was told, but soon saw some other westerners taking pics. My boss gave in and the next thing I knew the dean and vice dean of my school were asking to "take advantage of my 'mistake.'" I just got done emailing them their pictures. :) Several minutes into the vice-premier's speech cc tapped my leg and told me not to "push my luck." I then realized how awkward it must have been that my arm had been raised like a periscope as I was video-taping.

Now the goods...

This is the main entrance to the hall.

This is a famous Chinese painting of mountains. Mao wrote the characters in the upper left.

illiterate and need to find the amazing hover tool

right about now, i'm kicking myself for not taking more than one year of simplified chinese in college. why...why?

on shorter trips, i used to kind of just force myself to ask for help reading stuff everywhere. it was a matter of saving time, and not too bad, because you were going home in a few weeks. but trying to live life here and having to ask people day after day gets tiring, especially when oh, 75% of the people you ask to help you read something look at you like you're stupid (or maybe kind of cute, in a dumb way) because you can speak perfectly fine, but are pretty much illiterate. if i'm trying to meet people, this is okay, but if i'm exhausted and just trying to find the right thing to order or buy or how to get home, it is not so fun. trying to decipher stuff at the grocery store generally means a shopping trip that takes 5 times as long as it normally should. forget doing it for everything on the restaurant menu.

it's also humbling (although kind of fun) to read with little ones who can read better than you. going with M to a nearby migrant community to hang out with the kids, I find that although i'm supposed to be reading to them, if the book is chinese, it's more likely that they are reading to me.

i know the long-term solution is just to learn more characters, and i'm trying (got a Chinese version of InStyle to learn characters from). but in the near-term i am on a quest to find a pinyin (romanization) hover tool. i did a minor editing job the other day, and their computer had this amazing tool where if you hover over the characters in a doc or online, it gives you the pinyin. it was so great. but being a little muddleheaded, i didn't look to see what program it was and have been googling to try and find one. does anyone have any idea where i can get a tool like this?

P.S. as a non-sequitor update, D's stomach is actually doing relatively okay (most days), but he is rapidly losing weight. he can't seem to get full here. feel free to throw bulking-up ideas our way.

little delights in a fend-for-yourself society

yesterday marked the beginning of our fourth week "living" here. overall, we're really thankful that we have quickly started to feel settled and at home in our place. we've met some great people and are living close to good friends. pretty close to the university where D teaches too.

but there are admittedly some days when I come home feeling a little bit like Chin(ar) just beat me up. be it the guy whose spit particles accidentally hit my leg as I'm walking along (we've taken to night-showering here), or the person at the copy shop that inexplicably says "nope, we can't do that" to everything I ask about (what kind of copy stuff DO you do then?), or the service person answering the phone at the internet company who pretends she's a machine so she doesn't have to deal with my problems (seriously...I'm not kidding). then there's feeling like I'm going to get run over every time I cross the street. or the weird anthem music that comes on around 3:30 every weekday afternoon and blares in our apartment from who knows where for a good half hour. when getting off the subway, D generally has to steer me from behind so I can actually make it through the throngs of people...it is truly a fend-for-yourself society. takes some getting used to and it's not always so easy to "do everything without complaining or arguing."

i'm realizing how thankful i am for the little delights that seem to come along right when I'm feeling a little weary. it doesn't take much, I'm much like a little kid in that sense. stuff like...

tart yogurt popsicles - just when i was really starting to miss tart froyo, accidentally stumbled upon these in the mart downstairs. not really the same thing, but still a surprising delight. a 2.5 kuai ($0.37) ice cream cone from McD will do the trick in a pinch as well.

beautiful bowls for 24 kuai ($3...total!!) -- we're still in the process of buying kitchen stuff, and our new friend took us to this random dish vendor in a nearby outdoor market. could not believe the prices for the beautiful stuff.

the 7 kuai milk foamer from Ikea - runs on battery. actually makes a decent latte at home considering you're paying maybe 1/20 what you would be paying at starbucks or other knock-off coffee shop

our little sun-balcony - my favorite nook in the apartment. doubles as a place to dry our clothes (no driers!) but D ingeniously put one of our random sofa pieces out there so it's perfect for sitting and having some quiet time away from everything


the chick and the duck - these guys just randomly hang out around our big high rise apartment complex. so weird and so happy all at the same time. they're having a conversation here, amidst the parked cars. i'm tempted to adopt them like Joey and Chandler, except they poop a lot and it would be gross.

Go Bears!!

Our slingbox is finally working. Who knows for how long, but we got to watch tonite! Bye bye Minnesota, it was nice playing with you.

First Days of Classes

I've just finished my first week of teaching. It turns out I'm teaching 425 students! Kind of nuts. I have 9 classes in which I'm teaching 18 hours. But the nice thing is I only have to come up with 2 lesson plans a week. I teach 4 freshmen classes and 5 sophomore classes. The material overlaps.

Hah, but that's just it! I just said "the material." That is a bit misleading. So when they were giving me my schedule (4 days before classes began), I was given these requirements: "teach the freshmen 'survival English' and the sophomores how to express their opinions." ...That's it. No curriculum. no textbook! And what makes it so daunting is that this university is the number one engineering school in China (and overall in the top 5), so no slacking off here. What's more, I've found that the students' English is really stinking good. :) I had no idea going in, but by the end of the first day with the sophomores I was describing the difference between subjectivity and objectivity and they already had the vocabulary for it! Should be an interesting semester... But I'm looking forward to it!

I'm sorry I didn't take any pictures of the first days, but let me just describe some things. I had them play a few games, one was a name game. They got in circles of about 15 and went around sharing their names in counter-clockwise order while repeating the names of those who came before them - a sort of memory game. The twist was, in addition to saying their name, they had to add a silly action. For example, the first person would say something like "Hi, my name is Timmy" then rub his belly and tap his head. The next person would say "This is Timmy (rub his belly and tap his head), my name is Jake" then put out a piece sign, etc down the line. One guy said his name, and for his action turned to face the wall and punched it HARD!! I happened be looking in that direction at the time, and it made a loud noise - had to have hurt! Everyone in his group was like "what the heck?!" and rolling with laughter. The guy's face turned red... I thought it appropriate to change his action to punching into his own hand. Didn't want the rest of his group punching the wall... That dude was hardcore. The other cool thing I discovered is that I can play movies in class pretty easily through a projector. I'm thinking of showing some "Friends" episodes and having them re-enact them. Something tells me this would be very entertaining. I'll try to take videos... :)

dc

a tale of 2 stummicks

we've gotten some emails wondering how D's stomach is doing. most of you know about D's infamously bad innards. on past trips over here, he's been known to carry around packs of pepto, downing them like candy to "coat" his insides against whatever pesky stuff might react and send him running for the bathroom at the most inopportune times.

in the past two weeks, D's definitely had a rumble or two and immodium's been called upon. but our new theory is it's not the water, it's not the street food. it's CHEESE. he's minorly lactose in the states, but not usually with cheese. for some reason, cheese in chin(ar) just does not agree with D's insides. his first major rumble was after a lunch at Mickey D's. second major rumble followed a dinner of pizza. the only meals with cheese we'd had since coming. chinese food seems to be fine. korean too. we've been testing the hypothesis by *trying to avoid cheese (D is sad), and making up for it by going for the street food instead (D is happy). seems to be working so far.

we can't figure it out...does anyone with medical knowledge care to weigh in?

in other stomach news, C's normally iron hard insides were shockingly the first to take a major hit. we won't go into the gory details, but she was running for the bathroom every hour on the hour for 36 hours. could have been a stomach bug, but we're wary of the western lunch had the afternoon prior to which the messiness commenced...all the signs of classic food poisoning.

lessons learned:

(1) eating street food is not bad for you. in fact it is quite glorious.

(2) cheese in china = bad news for D

(3) western food, even in a "nice" restaurant, can cause major vomiting

be wary of the western food.*

*note: McDonald's ice cream is an exception to this rule

Week 1: kind of similar, but oh so different

Our first week has been quite the adventure. It takes SO much more time and energy to take care of stuff here. Bank accounts, getting physicals, buying fruit, trying to decide whether to flush your toilet paper....nothing is quite the same.

Sometimes, from far away, americanized things kind of look like how you would expect them to back at home. But then you look a little closer and it's kind of messed up.

The local "Starbuks" was having an "Annivsary"

At a local eatery, nice flowers for the table from far away...are actually fakey flowers in a Lay's potato chip can.

Who needs Kinko's when you can make copies at a little ladder window thingy?

Anyways...

M&J picked us up from the airport. They made a sign, in case we got lost. Good thinking. We stayed with them the first few days and are crazy grateful for their help in getting settled. Also makes it feel a lot more like home.

Turns out M&J live in the same apartment complex we visited briefly when we were here in 2007. Of all the places they could have lived, it was in the 1/2 mile square radius of familiarity we had in the entire city. Crazy.

Street vendors are selling yams everywhere this time of year. On one of our first days, M went with us to help us run errands and picked one up for us to share. Yum.

The same day, we met J at his work to grab lunch together. Sadly the picture didn't come out so well, but it's kind of mysterious.

And a very large snail at a street vendor. That's my finger. and M's. No we didn't eat it.

Say hello when you have a chance, we *should have internet (and skype) up in a few days.

cc