International Misfit

International Misfit Has Landed

2007-09-04T06:53:00.001+08:00

Now that our new life has begun, I realized the writing bug was nibbling again. It's funny, as I go about my day, I am mentally blogging in my mind. When I sit down at the computer however, I suddenly become blog-averse. Really writing is just like everything else in life. Even if you love expressing yourself, it requires tremendous discipline to consistently do so. So I decided, as a form of discipline and as a form of expression, that I should write again. It's especially sensible since we just made a huge transition in our life, from China back to the US. I plan to write about anything that pops into my mind because I'm writing for me. Sometimes I imagine it will be more of a diary - "I did X today", but rather than adhering to a rigid formula of what the blog will be, I'm just going to write and see what happens. Given my China blogging track record, that may mean little to nothing, but we shall see!

Catching up....

2007-07-08T18:49:00.000+08:00

No posts since May 28. Not a good record! However I think it's because we've been too busy the last two months. If our first semester in China was learning the ropes of living in a strange land, our second semester was building relationships with real friends. This term we've been going out with many teacher friends - to dinner, or out for drinks. We discovered a community where we could discuss our China experiences, and because they were here too, we could quickly relate about the ups and downs about every day life in this amazing but frustrating nation.

So what's been happening since June? Not too much.

-C and I have been getting up at 5am at least two days a week to go for a 3.5 mile walk around our local area. We provide oodles of free entertainment to those enterprising Chinese souls that are up at that hour. Despite not enjoying the stares, it has contributed to a shrinking waistline.

-I discovered numerous students in my writing class cheating. I was reading their essays when I realized they were using expressions like "hone your craft" that couldn't possibly be written by a native Chinese person. A quick google search revealed the essays they'd copied. This experience was a tremendous letdown for me. I had come to rate my writing class very highly until blatant plagiarism struck. It reminded me how rampant cheating is in Chinese society. If a student performs poorly or fails a class, there is always a way to remediate the situation in Chinese culture. Money, relationships, and gifts grease the wheels of academic success in this country. One of our friends, who was also teaching a Writing class had this experience. After class, a girl approached him and noted that her essay grades had been low. She wanted to know if there was anyway she could get better marks in the future. Our friend indicated that writing better essays would be a good start. The student then said..."Is there anything else I can do?". Although sexual favors seem unlikely in this case, the student may have been thinking about money or gifts. The implication was clear.

-We and our close friends had a barbecue on the roof of our buildings. It was a delightful evening, grilling marinated chicken and sipping some beer on a beautiful summer evening. We had a lovely view of the campus from up there. You certainly feel above it all. The grill we used wasn't particularly spectacular and it took a good hour to light the charcoal, but it seemed nothing could affect the enjoyment of the evening.

C - My Long March

2007-05-27T12:50:00.000+08:00

Last Saturday, I took part in the "5th Annual Dalian International Walking Festival", an event organized by a Dalian travel agency to promote walking, health, peace, and communication. There were four paths to choose from: 5K, 10K, 20K, and 30K. I'd heard my friend Lizzy complain a few weeks ago that none of her friends were willing do the 30K walk with her last year, so I told her I'd be willing to give it a try.

We met at 7 am on Saturday morning and took the tram to the walk's starting place, the enormous Xinghai Square. The tram was packed with people wearing the same t-shirts and hats as us, which was my first clue that I would be part of quite a large herd for the day.

When we arrived at the square, we had to search for the student group from our university that Lizzy had arranged for us to walk with. This was more easily said than done, because Xinghai Square is supposedly the largest public square in Asia and everyone was wearing the same shirt and hat. We finally found the students and I was introduced to them. I attracted quite a bit of attention, as there were some law students in the group who were really interested in studying law in the United States and seemed to think that because I am going to law school in the United States next year, I could give them some tips on how to make it more accessible and affordable for them. No such luck, however.

I also got some attention from a reported who was interested in a U2 quote I'd written on my tag (those things runners have pinned to them with their number on it, I'm not sure what it's called!) saying "What you got, they can't steal it, no, they can't even feel it; walk on." Lizzy translated it for the reporter as I quickly whispered to her not to mention that it's actually a song in support of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Burmese pro-democracy activist.

We eventually got underway at about 8:10 a.m. Lizzy and I had an interesting conversation that made the time pass quickly, but the crowd was so large that we were forced to trudge along at a snail's pace. After about four hours, we stopped at a small restaurant for lunch. I didn't know that lunch would be provided, so I'd brought granola bars, apples, and raisins. It was a good thing that I did, though, because the lunch consisted of rice and whole fishes that had been chopped coarsely and fried in the usual Chinese brown sauce - fins, head, bones, and all. I had a bone lodge itself in my throat a few weeks ago while eating similarly prepared fish, so I really wasn't interested in trying this batch.

After lunch, the leader of the student group announced to Lizzy and I that they were done walking for the day and that their bus would be arriving any moment to take them back to the university. Lizzy and I decided we weren't ready to quit; except for some blisters, we actually felt quite good. The group leader told us that there were only seven or eight kilometers left, which surprised me but sounded good nonetheless.

We soon learned, though, that we were just barely halfway there. We came to a point that we thought was the end until we saw a sign that said "You have finished 18 kilometers." Although that information was quite the morale-killer, we pressed on as the trail got steeper and the sun got hotter. Lizzy and I talked much less, and I was less polite to the strangers who approached me. The crowd thinned out substantially, and we made it to the end at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Not counting the 45 minutes for lunch, it took us six hours and thirty-five minutes to walk 30K. We then had to walk a bit further to find a bus and then a taxi, so by the time I got to sit down, I was quite tired!

Overall, I enjoyed the walk, even though the concept seemed a little silly to me. One of the random people along the way who wanted to speak with me asked me if we had similar events in the US. I told her that there are many competitive races and charity events that are somewhat similar but that I'd never heard of an event being held simply for the purpose of walking. As I feasted on Indian food that night with David and friends, though, the walk felt more than worthwhile!

Here's Lizzy at the two-thirds mark:

And here's me:

I'm already thinking about taking the same walk next Saturday!

D - Gotta Go to Gou?

2007-05-24T20:04:00.000+08:00

Last weekend, we went to a "resort" in Liaoning Province known as BingYuGou, which translates as "Ice Cavern Valley". It's northeast of Dalian towards the city of Dandong. The closest town is known as ZhuangHe. If you ever visit the Liaodong peninsula, where Dalian is located, you will very quickly notice that it's actually quite rugged. The peninsula is covered in green sloping hills and small mountains wherever you go. Dalian has some lovely sights where you can see the urban environment mixed in with smooth green peaks. Essentially BingYuGou is advertised in China as the mecca of these small mountains, scattered around small lakes in rivers. It's also known as "Little Guilin", Guilin being a famous city in southern China known for its beautiful scenery. After hearing about this place, a number of foreign teachers at our university were interested in going. Our friend W, who is the most advanced in his Chinese (he studies constantly), took it upon himself to organize a trip there with a Chinese touring company. With only a small assist from one of our Chinese friends, he booked a 2 day, 1 night from Dalian to BingYuGou and back. The trip included transportation and driver, tour guide (not English-speaking), admission to the park, lodging, 4 meals (lunch,dinner,breakfast,lunch), and a side trip to a local hot springs on Sunday. All of that cost only 300 RMB per person (about $39).

Early on Saturday morning, the "bus" arrived. When I say bus, I actually mean extended minivan that could in theory hold 12 people. The van had 2 seats up front (occupied by driver and guide), and 4 benches. To give you an idea of the spaciousness of the seats, it was literally impossible for me to sit down where my legs had a seat directly in front of me. The hip-to-knee portion of my leg was longer the space between seat back and seat front. Fortunately each bench featured a fold out seat, which allowed me to angle my legs to avoid amputation. We departed around 8:30 and arrived at the BingYuGou area around 12:30. Strangely our driver seemed to insist on taking the most remote roads possible, despite our route paralleling the DaZhuang expressway. The journey of course featured the usual insanity of Chinese driving. On narrow country roads, the driving experience is essentially an extended game of "chicken", as vehicles refuse to allow someone in front of them to slow them down at all. I can't imagine cruise control ever getting heavy use in China...

Our catered lunch at a local Chinese restaurant outside the park was less than delightful. It's a little difficult to eat family-style with 9 people. In addition, the food in northeastern China is very heavy on sauces and oils. When food is hot, it can be really delicious, but as soon as it gets cold it becomes unappetizing smothered in a salty brown sauce. And of course, we are a sight to the very common people and tourists in the area. Getting stared at is par for the course.

From the restaurant, we drove another 30 minutes to the park. To get in, you take a short boat ride from the entrance gate. While in the boat, some people tried to take a picture of us sitting next to their friend but we held up our hands and said "No!". Chinese people need to learn that foreigners, while interesting, are not zoo animals. We don't mind genuine curiosity, but no one wants to be part of a freak show.

Here's the entrance to the park: The full set of pictures can be found in our online photo album.

An example of the scenery...

Overall, BingYuGou was a strange experience. The scenery was quite lovely, but it was filled with chincy tourist attractions. One such attraction I took advantage of was a zipline that you could take to zoom from one side of the river to the other. I may be posting a movie of that soon. But there were many other things like this. Lots of cheap Chinese trinkets, a fake waterfall, swinging Indiana Jones bridges, etc. There were no hiking trails and no real sense of connecting with nature. It was overprogrammed to say the least. I think most of us were disappointed. After about 5 hours, we returned to the small town just outside the park to get cleaned up and then go to dinner.

C and I paid a little extra to get our own private room with private Western bathroom. Another couple did the same, but the remaining five members of our gang shared a room, and had a bathroom out in the hall (no shower, no western toilet). The beds were slats with a thin sheet on them. Ah, touring in the Chinese fashion. I truly felt like one of the common people. Somebody get me a Mao suit and a bouffant Kim Jong-Il hair style please! Dinner was a slight improvement on Lunch. The rest of the evening was split wandering around the truly tiny town and then downing a few beers in the hotel with our group.

The next day we got up bright and early for a quick Chinese breakfast. Now I know my blog entries are more on the negative side, but Chinese breakfast is awful. I really do like China overall, but let's face it, focusing on the differences is more entertaining. Your average Chinese breakfast consists of a boiled egg, and something called "baozi", which is essentially the most tasteless piece of dough man has ever intentionally concocted. It's a steamed bun. I think the plywood on our backbreaking beds probably had more flavor. Anyway, from breakfast, we proceeded to our final tourist destination of the trip, a hot springs for which we brought our swimming attire. In my mind, I pictured a beautiful cave full of elegant stalagtites and stalagmites, with gently steaming waters and winged Chinese women gently strumming the Chinese harp and perched upon rocks like the Sirens of Odysseus. Perhaps that description is a bit overblown, the phrase "hot springs" inspires fanciful thinking. I also briefly considered the famous Blue Lagoon of Iceland. What I got was a massive locker room full of naked Chinese men scrubbing each other down. I was a bit out of place wearing my baggy bathing suit, but I tried to block it out. When I finally got the courage, the hot spring pool was actually quite nice. My skin turned bright red with all the heat, but it was indeed relaxing. For those seeking a more co-educational experience, you could also emerge from the single sex area to a general family pool that used significantly cooler water.

After an hour or two, we departed the hot springs and headed back to Dalian. Using W's rudimentary Chinese, we begged the driver to take the highway. We eventually did so, but not before driving on the countriest of country roads. The plus side was that we got to see a lot of Chinese farms and farmers. There were people plowing with mules, and with donkeys pulling carts along the roads. Unfortunately for the people, the land appeared quite dry. I think of Dalian as being a wet city, but I think there's an overall drought in Liaoning province.

We forwent our final lunch on the way back, and survived another death-defying drive. All in all, it was a worthwhile trip, if only to experience touring Chinese style. If you're thinking of going to BingYuGou, you'll get no objection from me. Just don't think you're getting the natural experience. BingYuGou is all about the new China, custom tailored to the interests of unadventurous Chinese tourists seeking a weekend distraction.

C - give and take

2007-04-27T22:50:00.000+08:00

A few days ago, D and I went downtown to pick up a package his mother had very generously sent him for his birthday, and as we approached the downtown area, we both were struck by the skyline and bustle of the city we've been living in for nine months now. Obviously we don't get downtown often enough! Our life here has become rather routine: eat, sleep, teach, etc.

I'm hoping to be more active in the next few months before we leave, as there are a few important Dalian sights we haven't seen yet. There's a holiday coming up next week, although I'm not entirely sure what it's commemorating. Something about labor, I think. That's probably the only aspect of communism left in China. Well, that and the authoritarian government, I suppose. We don't have any exciting travel plans for the week, mainly due to the last-minute way in which the university notifies us of the holidays and which days' classes will be rescheduled. It's hard to book plane tickets when you have no idea which days will be holidays and which won't!

D - Feature Debut

2007-04-27T21:24:00.000+08:00

Without further adieu, I present my feature debut as China's newest and undoubtedly hottest voiceover artist. Try to restraint your glee at the sexy images of container ships, ore carriers, and hard-hatted shipyard workers.

To fit the constraints of YouTube, the video has been broken into two parts. In total, the video is 11 minutes long.

PART 1

PART 2

D - The New Voice of China

2007-04-15T17:21:00.000+08:00

And it's me. After a two week hiatus, IM is back to talk about my latest experience of note here in China. First, however, a little background is required. Dalian is uniquely positioned in China's northeast as a port. As an ice-free port, Japan, Russia, and China fought many battles over the peninsula in the last two centuries. Now that the city is free to do business, the Port of Dalian has evolved to become one of the Top 20 ports in the world. Naturally such a venture is interested in attracting foreign investment, and that's where I came in. The Port company has a public relations video they produce to inform people about the capabilities of the port and to advise of future plans for expansion. The video is reworked about every 2 years or so in Chinese, Japanese, and English. Most recently, the voiceover for the English version was done by an Australian foreign teacher that the FAO of the Port company ran into on the street. This year however, no such chance encounter was forthcoming, so they called up DMU (whom they have a partnership with) to track down an English speaker. For whatever reason, she called me and offered me the opportunity to work with the Port company.

The Port company FAO sent me over a working script for the eleven minute video and I edited it to improve the grammar and vocabulary. Then on Wednesday of last week, he picked me up and brought me to the training center of the company, where they had a small recording room. For the next three and a half hours, one paragraph at a time, they would play the video and I would read. Sometimes I would nail the paragraph in a single take, but more often it required two or three readings. The script is filled with long words that are necessary to describe seaport operation. Combined with the fact that the Chinese version of the script can be read about 1.5 times faster, the unwieldy vocabulary made it difficult to say all the words clearly and yet within the time constraints of the pictures on the screen. Although Chinese can seem like caveman speak to a foreigner if literally translated, its pictographic nature gives it remarkable expressive power in a short number of sounds. We had to edit the English version on the fly several times to make the words fit within the confines of the video.

From a humor standpoint, there were a few moments of interest. When we first started, I apparently wasn't giving the rather dry material enough emotional impact. In the event of an insignificantly dramatic performance, the head of public relations for the Port (who joined us in the recording studio) would say something to the FAO and the recording guy, and the FAO would then translate for me. "More emotion! Stronger! Faster! Slower! More passionate!" I did my best to keep a straight face given the unenviable task of making "The Port of Dalian was founded in 1899..." into an Oscar-worthy performance.

Here's a few snippets of the video script:

"The Port of Dalian is planning to build a new crude oil terminal with draft of -27 meters and capable of accommodating 500,000 dwt ULCC tankers. The capacity of crude oil storage will increase to 9 million cubic meters and the refined oil storage will increase to 1 million cubic meters. By the year of 2010, Dalian Port Xingang District will become an international trans-shipment hub and logistics and distribution center for oil products and liquefied chemicals with an annual volume of 80 million tons."

"In August 2006, the State Council approved the establishment of the Dalian Dayaowan Bonded Harbor Area. This is the most preferential policy for port development. Taking this as an opportunity, the Port of Dalian will speed up port construction, develop the Bonded Harbor Area into the logistics hub of Northeast China and contribute to the revitalization of the old Northeast Industrial Base. In 2006, the throughput of Port of Dalian made a record of 200 million tons and became one of the Top 20 ports in the world."

But the absolute best part of the video is the end, when the documentary is brought to a stirring conclusion....

"Holding the Seas and Harboring the World, the Port of Dalian, now over a century old, is still full of dreams and ambitions."

The Port company FAO informs me he will provide a copy of the video with my performance for my records, at which point I will certainly YouTube it for the world. All in all, it was a good job for me to take. I was paid 2000 RMB for my trouble, and I have to say I liked it more than teaching Oral English. A few more jobs like that and maybe we could actually go to South Korea for the May holiday after all.

D - The English Corner Mafia

2007-03-31T09:25:00.000+08:00

Almost every Chinese university is blessed with a variety of clubs known as "English Corner". English Corner consists of university students and ambitious locals (who may not be attending the school) that want to practice their English. The idea is that people can come and speak in an informal environment. All you do at an English Corner is just chat. Many universities in China consider this to be a formal part of a foreign teacher's job. Thus, English Corner responsibilities are written into the work contract and the teacher is obligated to go to English Corner every week. For C and I however, there is no such stipulation. All and any English Corner visits are from the goodness of our hearts as we take pity on the under-Englished masses of China.

Or at least that's how it seemed until this week. Then we met the English Corner Mafia. Last semester, C and I had avoided English Corner. You see, teaching students here can be mentally exhausting. You spend 90 minutes trying to rip English from the mouths of students who are too shy or too english-inept. Consider an analogy for Oral English: I get the mental picture of a dentist, putting his feet on a patient's chest, while trying to yank out a particularly stubborn molar that needs extraction. There are of course, successes when we get students talking and have some brief satisfaction, but more often we keep our pliers handy. Silence is truly golden.

Despite such frustrations, we did go to an English Corner last Fall. Essentially students (usually at least 10-15 per teacher, sometimes more) gather around the foreign English teachers in a massive huddle and they ask the same questions over and over again. Where are you from? What do you think of China? Why did you choose Dalian? How do you think of Taiwan? Do you love NBA? Who is your favorite NBA player? Do you like Yao Ming? And on and on it goes. Of course we try to ask students questions as well, but that often creates awkward silences for the students that lack English ability and they are inevitably interrupted by some English star who wants to move on to a discussion of Western movies.

For the first 30 minutes or so, I greatly enjoyed English Corner. It was a good time to get to know the students and learn about their backgrounds. After awhile I found it to be a drag. C had a better time although she shares my frustrations. She has a strong sense of obligation, so she returned to English Corner the next several weeks until the end of the year. Now in the second semester, we received an email from the English Corner coordinator inviting us back. C went the first week, and she was swarmed because there were only two foreign teachers there. She was the only white teacher though, the other was our friend M who is a Chinese-American that teaches here. Needless to say that a 20-something girl with blonde hair and blue eyes was more of a sensation than a 60-something Chinese man.

Well, this week on Wednesday night we were invited out to dinner by our friends from Canada, L and T. So C decided to give English Corner a raincheck. She even sent text messages to students telling her she couldn't make it. We went out and had a nice dinner at our favorite local Chinese place ("The One with the Blue Steps"). We returned and within about 20 minutes there was a knock at the door. I opened it and there were two Chinese students who wanted to come in. One of them was A, who C had gotten to know last year at English Corner. They came in and described the pitiable conditions of that night's Corner. Only 3 foreign teachers came and they *GASP* only stayed for about an hour, and then they left. C usually gets roped in to staying for 2 or 3 hours! The students wanted to make sure that C had not permanently forsaken the Corner. They were incredibly emphatic that she come next week and practically bullied her into it. I was personally appalled. C said that they are "a little needy". I'll say! "WHY DIDN'T YOU COME? WILL YOU COME AGAIN? PLEASE COME NEXT WEEK." Believe it or not, it's not our moral duty to go to English Corner. But that wasn't all. About an hour later, a different student called C to again confirm she would come next week. Then this girl tried to keep her on the phone to practice her English.

You know, it's really a shame how things work out. In class, students are very shy and don't take chances to learn English. Then at English Corner, people are almost rabid in their desire to learn and practice. It's ironic and a little sad that the people who most want to learn never seem to be in our classes. But I also think it was inappropriate how the students stalked us to try and ensure C would be at English Corner next week. Of course such pressure is always wrapped politely in China but it felt like extortion to me. I'm sure the next time we need a student's help they will say..."Of course, but someday....I may ask you to do me a favor...."

And the favor will inevitably involve English Corner.

I love Yao Ming

D - Parody of a Chinese Student Interviewing with an American Company

2007-03-27T08:27:00.000+08:00

I wrote this faux dialogue to help my students understand what NOT to do if they interview with a Western company. It's intended to be ridiculous. Believe it or not, there are some students that might actually do some of these things...

Interviewer: Good morning, my name is Mark and I’m a manager here at Dell Computers in Dalian.
Student: Good morning, nice to meet you, I’m <> but you can call me <>.
Interviewer: Okay, great, good to meet you too. Let’s get started with the interview. First, I’d like to know what your major is at Dalian Maritime University, and why you chose that major.
Student: My major is <>, and I picked it because I didn’t really know what else to choose.
Interviewer: Uh, okay, I see. Well, why are you interested in working for Dell Computers?
Student: Dell is a very famous American company, so I think I want work here.
Interviewer: Yes, Dell is very well known in the world, but I want to understand your interest in our company. We like to hire people who have a strong passion for computers and helping our customers. How do you feel about the computer industry?
Student: I like computers. On the weekend, I usually play World of Warcraft all day long. How do you think about Warcraft?
Interviewer: I don’t really want to talk about hobbies right now, I want to understand why you are a good fit for Dell. Tell me about your favorite class that you’ve taken at the university.
Student: My favorite class is Oral English with my foreign teacher, D.
Interviewer: Interesting - Your spoken English is very good.
Student: Oh, no it’s not. My English is very poor.
Interviewer: No, really, I am pretty impressed with your English.
Student: Sorry, my English is really terrible. But I like my English class because my teacher never gives me any homework, and I think foreigners are very funny. They do many strange things. Especially Americans like D.
Interviewer: Okay, let’s discuss something else. Why should Dell hire you? What qualities do you bring to the table?
Student: Which table?
Interviewer: Uh, it’s just an expression in English. What I mean is, tell me about your strengths, how you can help Dell.
Student: I will work very hard. I will do whatever you tell me.
Interviewer: We do like team players at Dell, but we also want people who can think for themselves. What goals do you have for this job, if you are hired?
Student: I want to make money. Then I will marry a beautiful Chinese girl and I will have a son. Do you like Chinese girl?
Interviewer: Sorry, that’s not really an appropriate question. I think I have learned everything about you that I need to know. Do you have anything else you want to say?
Student: Do you think China and Taiwan are one?
Interviewer: I beg your pardon?
Student: I want to know your opinion on Taiwan.
Interviewer: I don’t think that’s relevant to this position. But thank you very much for your time. We will be in touch.

C - Net Nanny says...

2007-03-21T11:27:00.000+08:00

We're blocked in China again! We can post entries in China but we can't read them... Arrgh.

D - Keeping It Real

2007-03-18T19:45:00.000+08:00

We have now completed two weeks of our 18 week semester here in DMU's spring semester. Both C and I had a tough time moving from full time vacation for two months to the partial vacation that we have while teaching. The two of us have different causes for our frustrations. C, never one to impose her will, did not request anything specific from the English department in terms of classes. Her reward was a full complement of maritime engineering students, who are either starry-eyed at her blonde hair, or trying to demonstrate that Chinese kids have ADD as well. I on the other hand, have quiet, dutiful students and a nice mix of guys and gals, because I specifically requested NO martime students. The trouble for me is the common tendency of students to remain stone faced and stubbornly unwilling to talk unless called upon by their esteemed teacher. There are times that one wants to grab them by the collar and yell "Good God man, say something! anything that's not completely predictable and boring!" Thus, although I occasionally scowl at two boys in one of my classes for their ridiculous chosen English names of "X-Boy" and "Butcher", I must confess that they make class a little more interesting. Finding a lack of conformity in this culture, even in the form of class clown behavior can make class more rewarding. So while C is shouting over the din in her classes, I'm trying to stir the pot. One of my most recent efforts included rapping "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" to demonstrate the importance of speaking rhythm. Eminem is not impressed.

Despite our frustrations and the slight adjustment period, things are going better now. We've slipped back into the routine of lesson planning and dealing with the students as they are. Although I am not particularly thrilled about the teaching component of our adventure here, it's excellent for making me better on my feet and significantly less nervous about public speaking. So while my enthusiasm for the work itself may be reduced a bit, I am also much confident. On balance I would say things are better than last term. Knowing what you're doing to an extent makes it a lot easier.

In addition to feeling more comfortable, I am also teaching a Writing class for English majors. They can actually speak and write a good bit in that class and although I'm no English professor, I'm enjoying throwing new things at them. For example, in my first class we read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart", which is a charming story about a psychopath who kills an old man because he has a diseased eye. Horror stories exist in China of course, but Poe gets inside the mind of terrible people like no one else, so it was a little shocking to them. My second class we started using the book, which was written in the US and isn't half bad. Our first chapter is about the compare and contrast essay. To begin our practice, I had them describe pictures of a Dachshund and a Bassett Hound together with me in class. Next, we wrote basic sentences describing each dog breed, and finally we added transitional expresions such as "while", "although", "on the other hand", and so on. It sounds silly to use dogs for a compare and contrast essay, but I think it went rather well. They were probably just relieved that I didn't break out a Stephen King short story next. I found it amusing when a majority of students in the class described Doxies and Bassetts as "ridiculous looking". I also enjoyed when one girl said Bassett Hounds look "miserable". But of course they are. That's why we love them.

C - the lesser of two evils

2007-03-15T20:07:00.000+08:00

A few months ago, I purchased an innocent-looking 10-pack of pocket-sized Kleenex®. I'd learned to carry at least one pack of tissues at all times during my first trip to China, because toilet paper in bathrooms (and napkins in restaurants, and papertowels next to sinks) are an extremely rare delicacy. I was horrified to learn, however, that each and every tissue in this 10-pack was perfumed, and not with good perfume, either. I am very sensitive to strong smells -- they can give me a headache nearly instantly -- so I relegated these tissues to the back of my closet to be used in case of emergency only.

Before we took off for Shanghai, I noticed that my purse was low on absorbant materials and threw several packs of the smelly tissues into my purse. I never removed the tissues from my purse when we returned to Dalian, and it actually came in handy today when I had to use a restroom on campus during a class break. The bathrooms on campus can be smelled from 30 feet in either direction, and I always try to avoid using them, but today I had to go somewhere right after class and was therefore forced to use them. And they smelled so awful that I was extremely thankful for the perfumed tissues, and gratefully held them up to my nose the entire time I was in the bathroom.

D - We're falling behind!

2007-03-10T08:06:00.000+08:00

In my last two posts I forgot to express my concern about how the US is falling behind China in key areas. For example, as the photo below demonstrates, China is in the process of creating "advanced three-dimensional transportation networks"!!! In the US, we only have two-dimensional networks! You've heard of the missile gap from the Cold War, well now we have the dimensional transportation network gap...

Well I sure hope they make it 3-D because otherwise only people from Flatland could use it.

D - Rolex, anyone?

2007-03-08T22:35:00.000+08:00

No, we haven't gotten into the fake rolex business I promise. But if you're looking for a good fake, I can tell you where to go. Stop by any one of Shanghai's classy tourist traps, and you'll be offered watches faster than you can say 不要 (that's Chinese for "go fly a kite" [which itself is my-mother-speak]). C, who has a better nature than most people I've met, is never one to be rude to anyone, even aggressive and annoying hawkers. Nonetheless, after awhile, even she put on the blinders and started pushing more quickly past the Shanghai entrepreneurs. I will say this for the salesmen - they use a colorful, laminated poster with pictures, as opposed to a guy in New York who would probably just open his jacket and have them hanging. Yes, inkjet technology has revolutionized the illegal goods market on the Shanghai streets. So if you're in Shanghai and you're heading for Nanjing Lu or the YuYuan Gardens, gird up to deal with China's tribute to street capitalism.

But I digress - Shanghai wasn't all bad. For one thing you can more styles of Western food there than anywhere else in China. C and I, knowing we were returning to Dalian where our only Western cuisine respites are KFC, McDonalds, and Pizza Hut (is that an unholy trinity or what) decided to take advantage of the food diversity. One evening we dined on spanish tapas at a lovely place called Azul Tapas. For lunch one day we had Japanese. Another night we hit TGI Friday's. And on the third night, and this feels like a confession even writing this - we went to Hooters. Yes, you read that correctly. Hooters is now in China. Upon discovering this fact during our initial day in the city during a walk in the Pudong district, I remarked to C that they might have trouble finding qualified applicants. After seeing the restaurant from afar initially, we resolved that we would not go there. The truth is, I'd never been to a Hooters restaurant in the US, let alone China, and I wanted to keep the streak alive. Our steadfastness was shaken by a craving for chicken wings (which Hooters is somewhat known for), and a lovely ad we saw in a taxi. In case you didn't spot it on our photo album, I am pasting it below:

The decision to go to Hooters was a joint one, I must add, a unified husband and wife choice. Perhaps you think I jest, but maybe you're not aware my wife is from the home of chicken wings (Buffalo, NY). How could she resist?

To be honest, Hooters was actually quite good. My chicken sandwich was excellent, the wings were good, and C's caesar salad was also quite tasty. The conversation with the waitress was also a highlight. They all spoke good english, and our server related how some American men explained the double entendre nature of the "Hooters" name. Apparently prior to his revelation, the Chinese girls working there thought the name was merely an innocent reference to a cute and friendly owl. They were a little taken aback but they didn't stage a walk out or anything. I guess the biggest culture clash for them was when some other Chinese came into the restaurant and asked them why they were wearing tight fitting tank tops and short shorts during the dead of winter.

Anyway, you haven't learned much about our trip to Shanghai in this post. That's okay, I'm getting to it. The truth is it's hard to summarize museums, exhibitions, and architecture which is what we primarily experienced. I would say our primary activity was walking around the city. Compared to most Chinese cities, there are a lot of interesting buildings left over from the European heyday, so it's enjoyable to take a stroll and enjoy the variety. There's even a hip section of town (Hengshan Lu) where trendy looking bistros, bars, and cafes coexist on tree lined streets.

In terms of cultural experience, we visited the Shanghai Museum which is filled with cultural artifacts from China's incredibly long history. That's interesting but 5 floors of old bronze pots and sculptures of Buddha eventually wears out its welcome. We also stopped in the Shanghai urban planning exhibition, which details Shanghai's transformation from backwater to modern metropolis. The exhibition was a self-congratulatory brouhaha essentially praising the wisdom of the government in how it has planned the city. There was however one redeeming feature of the exhibition: a full scale model of the entire city that filled a gigantic room. See our photo album towards the end for some examples. I wouldn't want to be the guy that tripped while they were putting the last tiny wooden skyscraper in the place. Finally, we also went to the Shanghai City Temple. We were there during the Spring Festival, and it seemed like everyone was in a traditional mood. People were burning incense to the ancestors, and they also would go up to the innumerable idols, er, statues in the temple, press their hands together as if to pray, and bow their heads for a moment. Coming from Christianity, it's strange sight. People here are so areligious as a whole, but once a year they certainly put on a performance to get the blessings of those who have gone before.

One final note on Shanghai before I sign off. If you're going to visit and you don't know anyone locally that can guide you to cheaper pastures, make sure your bring your wallet. The city is very expensive, more so than New York in many cases. The cultural attractions and so on are priced at a standard Chinese rate, but the restaurants and cafes are quite pricey!

D - Levitation without Meditation

2007-03-04T11:28:00.000+08:00

C and I returned Friday night from a visit to Shanghai, in south central China. We arrived Tuesday morning and spent 3 nights and 4 days. From a pure tourist standpoint, that's too long for Shanghai. It has often been noted that up until the 20th century Shanghai was a tiny fishing village. Then, the decline of the Qing dynasty and its concessions to Western powers began radically transforming the city into a hub of commerce and banking for southeast Asia. Britain, France, and even the US setup various operations in the city. With the end of World War 2 and the rise of the Communists, the foreigners were kicked out of the country and Shanghai again became a quiet place (albeit with European architecture and buildings). In the next stage of Shanghai's history in the 1990s, the PRC's government chose Shanghai as a place to demonstrate the new power of China's opening economy. Billions have been invested turning Shanghai into a world class city. Thus while Beijing can be considered the cultural capital of the country with its Forbidden City and Heavenly Temple, Shanghai is China's economic stake in the post-modern world of the 21st century.

Perhaps most symbolic of Shanghai's most recent transformation is the Shanghai Transrapid Magnetic Levitation (maglev) train that runs from Shanghai Pudong International Airport to suburban Longyang station on the Shanghai Metro (subway in NYC terms). Maglev technology has been around for 60 years but there are few implementations of it. It allows for incredibly fast speeds but is currently extremely expensive to build. To China's undemocratic government however, cost is no barrier to demonstrating her entrance on the world stage. Like a model on the runway, China struts her stuff with all the confidence of the emperor's new clothes. As C observed on our trip, the maglev is a colossal waste of money - but it sure is fast. Reaching a top speed of 431 km/h (267 MPH), the maglev scorches the 30km distance in 7 minutes. Compare this to a Boeing 747 which needs a take-off speed of only 180 MPH. Despite my distaste for huge government projects (and China's heavy-handedness at pushing them through), I have to say that the technology itself is impressive. As a child, one of my favorite books was called "Trains". I loved the different kinds of cars and locomotives. To ride on something like the maglev (which I've read about longingly for years) was in many ways a dream come true. The train is fairly smooth at top speed, but getting there takes more vibration than I expected. Additionally, the train is rather loud while it's accelerating. It's not any louder than a jet engine during takeoff, but doesn't sound effortless. I should note that despite the adrenaline rush of traveling so fast, it's not particularly practical from location standpoint. Longyang Metro station is on the far east side of Shanghai in the Pudong development area, far from any tourist hotel. Once you arrive there, you need to take the Metro into the city, or a taxi to your hotel. We took the taxi, which was about 35 RMB to the Bund area. Cost wise however, depending on where your hotel is, the maglev may make sense. It's 40 RMB one way if you have a same-day airline ticket. Add in 30-40 RMB to your hotel and you're looking at 80 RMB. This is compared to a likely 140-150 RMB taxi ride if you go straight to the airport.

So without further ado - here are two crude videos I filmed while on the maglev. The first shows the train getting up to speed, and the second is a brief one showing the top speed of 431 km/h. No doubt if you have further interest in the subject you can search YouTube and get a more professional take.

Ramp-up:

Top Speed:

I will continue my thoughts on Shanghai in a future entry of IM. Don't forget to check out our web photo album for a sneak preview.

D - 过年好 (Commence the detonation)

2007-02-23T10:23:00.000+08:00

Contrary to the title of the post, 过年好, Guo Nian Hao is a traditional Chinese greeting heard during this season meaning Happy New Year. Needless to say we've been hearing it regularly in Dalian this past week. We've also experienced a different type of greeting recently - the explosion. Apparently the Year of the Pig is so fortunate, everyone in Dalian has taken to setting off their fireworks at all hours of the day. Our second night back I was awakened at 4am by a cacophony of cannon shots. And I do mean cannon shots - I think they have a cannon on campus that can shoot blanks. In China, fireworks are more about sound than sight (but there's plenty of light as you'll see), thus the ongoing orchestra of black powder.

All of this is a tremendous contrast to places like New York or your favorite nanny State where giving your children a sparkler could get Social Services called and your kids in foster care. In China on the other hand, if you're not handing out bottle rockets by age 6, you are probably being delinquent in your parental duties.

Given all the fireworks, we decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Thus on Monday evening we decided to attend the Dalian City fireworks show at Xinghai Square. We took two brief videos with C's camera while there. The first is just a quick panorama of our spot at the Square. The second is the beginning of the fireworks show. Not being a fireworks aficionado I couldn't tell you if it was a good show or not. C wasn't that impressed, so I will defer to her experience.

Panorama:

Beginning of the show:

And if you're really interested in getting a good feel for the fireworks around the city, click here. This is a video made by another Dalian resident, as found on YouTube. Our video taking/editing skills are not up to this standard, so check it out as you'll see a lot more.

After the fireworks were over, we had to somehow get back to our apartment. We went with some of the other foreign teachers though who wanted to eat first. It turned out that it didn't really matter. The crowds were huge and we couldn't get across the street to the 202 tram line. So instead we walked a couple of kilometers down to Heishijiao where our local McDonald's is. Now Xinghai Square really isn't that far from our campus, but it seemed a lot longer when we were walking. Fortunately, it wasn't overly cold (high 30s). After a couple hamburgers we were able to catch the tram there, and get back to campus. I felt bad for the girls working at McDonald's because the place was mobbed and they seemed woefully unprepared for such a huge crowd. I doubt they've ever been that busy at 9:30pm because people here don't really like to eat late.

C - an unusual Chinese New Year celebration

2007-02-19T08:46:00.000+08:00

Who would've guessed that a great Italian meal could be had in Dalian, even during the height of Chinese New Year? We've been eating pretty sparsely at home, with peanut butter, oatmeal, and yogurt being our staples, but last night had a feast at a restaurant called Olive Garden (not the Olive Garden, however.) I had discovered through Dalian XPat that this restaurant was open all week despite it being Chinese New Year, and talked D into going there over the Paulaner Brauhaus.

Our Danish friends were interested but the lady of the house was ill, so just one of them, our retired professor friend, came along. Nearly the first thing he said to us was "I'm so glad you came back!" (Apparently some of the other teachers have abandoned ship over the holidays). But the real bombshell came next -- he said "You've scored yourselves a free dinner!" and then explained "I found out an hour ago that I'm going to be a grandfather!" He was all smiles and had obviously been crying a few happy tears not long before. So we were of course elated for him, and enjoyed celebrating the great news with food and wine and the non-stop fireworks of Chinese New Year.

The food was good indeed -- our friend had an Australian steak that was done perfectly to his liking, D had a margherita pizza that smelled wonderful, and I had a salmon cream penne pasta dish that was so good that I had the leftovers for breakfast.

My movie binge has kicked off again. We bought five DVDs at the grocery store on Saturday: Casino Royale, Borat, Crank, Pan's Labyrinth, and The Last King of Scotland (all illegally copied, of course).

So our Chinese New Year has consisted of 1. lots of sleep, 2. lots of movies, and 3. Italian food. But hey, I'm trying:

"福" essentially means that we wish the best for all of you in the coming year. And we do!

D - Eating our way to China

2007-02-17T08:29:00.000+08:00

Home sweet home! Well, sort of. We are back in Dalian China after an epic 29 hour journey. After many days of uncertainty when we would return, we finally picked February 15 as our departure date. To make the trip to China a little more pleasant, I decided to utilize some of our Continental miles to upgrade from Economy to their BusinessFirst class. They had previously denied the use of the miles for reserving a one way flight, so I was amazed when they said we could actually do it.

Despite having never experienced Business or First class on my previous 4 international flights, I was pretty sure what to expect. We'd get big cushy seats that almost lie flat, lots of free drinks, and a half decent meal. The seat is worth its weight in gold. You can adjust almost every aspect from an extendable footrest to lumbar support. If you're like me though, you can't sleep unless you're totally flat. So "lie-flat" (which is really at an angle and not entirely flat) is not flat enough for me. The most interesting thing though was the huge amount of food we got.

Some examples of the food:
Appetizer of pork and lobster
Mesclun Salad
Champagne with lunch
Steak as the main course
Port wine and chocolate for dessert
Second meal of chicken noodle soup (more like chicken noodle stirfry actually)
Third meal of fresh fruit, omelette

Interestingly, I found the food passed the time more than movies or my futile efforts to sleep. The first 6 hours breezed by thanks to the initial meal service. The flight attendants were a little nicer in BusinessFirst but I still wasn't overwhelmed by the service. I guess it's hard for anyone to sound pleasant repeatedly asking "Coffee, Tea, something to drink?" 500 times a flight. Oh and I don't recommend the Oscar nominated film "Babel". I'm a sucker for artsy make-you-think kind of movies but I just didn't get it. It's also over the top depressing, which probably isn't the best choice for people who are trapped inside a small cylindrical shell for 13 hours.

After our cushy 13 hour flight to Beijing, the less pleasant part of the journey began. Primarily it consisted of waiting in lines for everything. It took forever to get through the customs line. We had to wait 5 hours for our connecting flight to Dalian. The plane was packed. Getting out of the baggage claim in Dalian was an exercise in human osmosis. The taxistand was a mad house. But finally we made it back to Dalian Maritime University. Note to self - try not to travel on the verge of Chinese New Year again.

Upon waking up the next morning, we decided to go looking for groceries. Normally we get basic things like water, coke, oatmeal, and snacks at a variety of "little stores" on campus. Being Chinese New Year however, this place is a ghost town. Around every corner I keep expecting to see a creaking saloon fluttering in the breeze and a cow skull half buried in the sand. Fortunately international capitalism came to the rescue in the form of Trustmart (a large Chinese grocery chain, now owned by Walmart). It's not in reasonable walking distance but it's not far on the bus so we were able to get our groceries there.

After a taxi back to the apartment and carrying a couple gallons of water up 5 flights of stairs, we had a lunch of peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Then we promptly took a nap, which lasted from 3PM Saturday to 4AM Sunday morning. And that's why I'm writing this blog entry at 6AM our time. Needless to say we caught up on our sleep, but I am not sure we're adjusted to the time zone just yet. My next mission is to avoid going to bed at 6PM!

D - One more time

2007-02-15T11:07:00.000+08:00

Our vacation in the US is over. A major benefit of teaching english in China, at least in our university is the ridiculous amount of vacation we get. We left China after finishing semester 1 on December 16. We're flying back tomorrow (February 15) but we don't actually start the new semester until March 5!

We had a lovely time in our homeland, traipsing from Doylestown to Buffalo and back. We've spent a wonderful amount of time with our families, but we are definitely ready to have our own place again. The absence of family is really what makes you appreciate it the most. In July, when we return, we will be overjoyed to come back. But after a great visit, it's time to begin the adventure again. A few weeks ago I was inclined to stay in the USA. A part of me thought about breaking our contract (or buying it out) but in recent time I've experienced a renewed sense that there is more for us in China. We have more to see and more to learn. And so we begin our trip tomorrow morning on an icy, cold day in Pennsylvania, and will finally end it in Dalian, China about 29 hours later.

See y'all on the other side

D - Livin' in America

2007-01-06T12:38:00.000+08:00

C and I are alive in well in Buffalo, NY but it's been awhile since we wrote, so let's recap since December 16 (our most recent day in Dalian).

We left on a snowy December morning in Dalian. What started out as a light dusting appeared to be turning into a full blown blizzard by 6:30am (our flight was to Beijing was scheduled at 8am). For a few worried hours we gazed out the windows of our gate watching Chinese men in camoflauge form a giant shovel and dig out the planes. In the US, you would see snowplows doing this in work, but in China it's more efficient to throw manpower at almost any problem. To be fair, snowplows were clearing runways, but I assume that's only because runways are so long. Anyway, our flight was delayed from 8am to 11am, but it wasn't a problem because our flight from Beijing to Newark was at 5pm. Both flights were uneventful and a lot easier than the trip over to China. Let's face it, going back home is a lot easier than throwing caution to the wind and hitching a ride to a foreign country.

First stop on our US journey was my parents home in southeastern Pennsylvania. We spent December 16 to December 28 there and had a great time.
Highlights of PA part 1:
-Indulging my sentimental side and watching Rocky Balboa with my brother
-Playing with our dachshund Cody, who turns from jolly socializing to teeth-bared growling when he gets ahold of a rubber steak toy with a squeaker. In this state of mind he is referred to as "Fang".
-Gaining at least 5 lbs feasting on Western cuisine. Pizza. Hamburgers. Baked Beans. Grilled Salmon. Coffee. Did I mention pizza?
-The usual antics representative of our family dynamics. Difficult to describe but I love my family to pieces and wouldn't trade it for anything.
-A bed not featured on "World's Most Infamous Prisons" (our China mattress is a little stiff)

From PA we have now traveled to C's stomping grounds in Western New York state, up in the Buffalo area. It was a quick flight from Newark and now we are enjoying the company of her family.
Highlights thus far:
-Seeing C's cousin's 10 month old child. Her cousin moved to Spain a number of years ago to teach english and ended up marrying a Spanish girl and becoming a permanent resident. Their offspring is incredibly cute
-Tonight's euchre game with her father. Euchre is a card game played principally in Western New York and the rest of the midwest - places where German ancestry has traditionally been prevalent. Of course it's also quite popular on Yahoo! games, which I don't have an explanation for.
-Anticipation of chicken wing consumption at one of Buffalo's traditional establishments (e.g Duff's or Anchorbar).
-Chowder making on New Year's Even. C's father has since 1982 (I believe) been making what people outside of WNY would call "thick soup" - but it's a rather large injustice to do so. It's an all day extravaganza of cutting carrots, potatoes, celery and grinding meat, followed by standing in the cold and stirring the chowder in a 30 gallon drum. There are always large numbers of people that stop by for a bowl or two (31 in 2006).

Tomorrow we are going to Rochester to catch up with some old friends and watch a RIT hockey game. RIT of course is my alma mater. Next week we are driving to Chicago to check out the city and visit the law school, as that's C's next stop on the life express. Towards the end of January we will return to Pennsylvania for another week or so and then it's back to China in early Februrary. From there we have many possibilities for travel but we would like to get a good view on the Chinese New Year.

Anyway, that's the story from the City of Lights. Til next time...

C - on traveling 7000 miles just to watch movies

2006-12-12T16:21:00.000+08:00

One good thing that's come out of our little China adventure is me overcoming my inability to sit through entire movies. Perhaps this has happened because I often feel the need to escape from this place and movies offer a way to do that. I've watched the following movies in the past month or so:

Thank You For Smoking
Walk the Line
The Shawshank Redemption
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
A Beautiful Mind
Bridget Jones' Diary
Honey
Mission: Impossible
Groundhog Day
Snakes on a Plane

(The movies are ranked in the order in which I enjoyed them.)

Ten movies! In just a month! I typically watch only a handful of films per year.

Anyways, about my China funk. Some might think "Why are you unhappy? You seriously disrupted your and your husband's life after having the desire to do this for over two years -- why aren't you enjoying it?" Well, I don't know. I never thought of this trip as any kind of vacation. I guess living abroad is something I've always expected of myself, sort of in the same way certain countries require all of their young people to spend two years in the military. It was just something I had to do, and with China being a "hot topic" and a country I already had some level of interest in/experience with, it seemed like a good choice. But I'm sure it's odd to see someone struggling with something they have only a self-imposed obligation to do.

D - Letter from a Student

2006-12-03T12:26:00.000+08:00

Below, I have pasted an email I received from one of my students. His class will be finishing up shortly so he sent me a note. I have removed personally identifying materials. I should also mention that C has also been getting thoughtful emails and text messages thanking her for her class. I suppose it's possible they are buttering us up for a better grade but I think it's highly unlikely. Most of these students are in line for As anyway. They are just appreciative of having encountered a different teaching style.

NOTE: I didn't correct the mistakes in the mail, but I am not leaving them in to ridicule my student. I couldn't even come close to writing something like this in Chinese. He is a very good student and I enjoyed having him in class.
==================
Dear David：
　　 I am a student of yours ,in Class10 Maritime Engineering. Yes I am XXXX who is interested in both you and your lesson.Since you know ,I always used to sit in front of classroom. Although,I am not good at English ,especial spoken English,I can grasp the main ideal you espressed at lesson .I have leared more from you ,which I can never gain from any ohher place ,for instance ,the accent of American ,the form of expression ,the culture of westerner ,and so on .On this point ,all of my classmates should express great gratitude to you ,think you very much,David.

I do not know how do you feel about our class .In the process ,some of my mates were not earnest,and not all of us were punctual,and so forth ,which allways made you at loss .Some times you had to make us be quiet .I know ,all of this bad phemenomenon or perfonrmance made you felt disappointed ,to a foreign teacher ,especially you as a new comer ,that might be a kind of disappointment or a chellenge of your job in China. But in fact,almost none of us do not like you or your tuition.You are our first foreign teacher,so you are particulliar.Comparing whit our former Chinese English teacher ,the class you tought is very interesting .To say the least ,I am a loyal fan of you. Approaching to the end of the semester ,I feel relucktant to say farewell to you and your excellent class .Once so many times ,I had made up my mind to make friends with you, so as to helped you and learned smothly spoken English from you ,but I never expressed this mind to you for no apparent reasons.

Well ! I will never meet you and communicate with you after the final exam.Which is a kind of grief to me in a sense. In one"s life ,a person will come to so many people,but the person will only can keep few of them in his\her mind. I belive you will be one of those who are kept in my mind untill the day I disapear from the world ! Nest monday ,obviously,is the end of the course ,but not the end of the motion ,as well as the relationship between us. Whenever and wherever you can resort to me when you are in trouble ,on the piont you belive I have the ability to offer what you need ! Lasterly ,resly think you for your teach !The years will obscure what teach me ,but not you -David my first foreign teacher !
Best wishes

D - Examining the Chinese Mind

2006-11-30T13:54:00.000+08:00

17 days until we return to the US for a couple of weeks. Almost there! In the mean time, class has been keeping us busy. In this post I wanted to talk about some of our past lessons and how we're doing examinations.

As an Oral English teacher, one of the dilemmas is deciding what the final exam should be. We've worked on a broad array of different topics - from directions to music to job interviews. The primary focus is on pronunciation and on-the-fly creation of english. The problem is that testing someone's speaking, while not difficult, can take some time. Our classes are 1 hour and 30 minutes, and each class has about 30 students. To examine a student for even five minutes would take 2 and a half hours. There are no classes during lunch here, so for exams my classes will get extended into eating time. Pity the poor students that catch me at 1pm when I haven't eaten since 8:30am!

I have two sets of students - 3rd year marine engineers and 1st year automation students. I haven't decided on an exam for the freshmen yet but for the marine engineers I am going to have them use phrases from our "For and Against" lesson.

Each students will get one of 8 proposal.

Providing Free University Education
Voting for Government Officials
Paying Government Officials More Money
Requiring China College Entry Examination
Giving Money to the Poor
Banning Smoking in Public Places
Creating high taxes on alcohol
Allowing Women in the Military

The students have to say if they are "for" or "against" the proposal and why. I will prod them with some additional questions to make them prove they aren't just going from memorization. I also gave them a general rubric describing how I will evaluate their performance. I'm expecting a pretty normal distribution, although the only students who will fail are probably those who haven't been coming to class and getting their attendance grade. I decided to do "For and Against" because 1) We did it in class 2) Opens the door to using a lot of different words and 3) I want them to develop opinions. Chinese people are so uninclined to have strong opinions so by discussing even mundane or previously-decided questions, I think there's some value.

What else have we been up to? Well C and I have been showing movies to our freshman classes. Allowing them to see how real people communicate in English is beneficial and helpful to their listening abilities. We turn on the English subtitles because their reading is far past their speaking. C has been showing "Walk the Line" (The Johnny Cash story). I showed that once but I have also shown "A Beautiful Mind". The students really seem to like both movies overall. Yesterday C noted how the Chinese are somewhat obsessed with the fact that a native Chinese person from the People's Republic of China has never won the Nobel Prize. There's a massive inferiority complex that results in the PRC thumping its chest whenever possible. "A Beautiful Mind" of course is about a schizophrenic mathematical genius who eventually wins the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994. C commented that the movie would no doubt increase their Nobel fever - "Look, even crazy people in our country can win this award! What's wrong with China??"

I think "A Beautiful Mind" is a good movie for them to see. It demonstrates that in America, despite the odds, even a mentally ill man can meaningfully contribute. I don't have any knowledge about the Chinese mental health system but somehow I too many John Nash's have been allowed to escape.

I feel like this has been an exceedingly boring entry. There have been many moments I wanted to report but you really have to write them down while they are emotionally fresh. This blogging thing is not as easy as it looks!

D - In the Home Stretch

2006-11-21T08:26:00.000+08:00

Wow, it's been awhile, but I promise we haven't been taken to prison or anything. The easy part of my schedule is over now and I am in the midst of the final push to the end of the semester. It's currently week 14 of 17 at DMU, so we're moving closer to our return to the US (which we are rather excited about).

The new apartment is good. If you're curious to see what it looks like, check out our photo album. Try to ignore the handsome fellow wearing long johns to keep warm. In reality though, we are plenty warm now. Turns out our air conditioners are also heat pumps that can warm the place up. And obviously our internet is working now. It's odd, we have much bigger apartment in China that we did when living in New Jersey. Of course everything here has the tinny quality you come to expect in China. You look at the faucet fixtures and they look pretty normal, but you touch them and something is just off. The handle is loose, the silver finish flecks off, it feels like it's going to break. This is the way for most things in China that are not carefully purchased. Everything has an overwhelming cheapness.

I want to relate an interesting story about the move. The FAO indicated that some student volunteers and movers would show up Saturday at 10am. They did and the moving was quite efficient. Within two hours we were pretty much moved to our new place. The method of moving surprised me a little bit. If you've seen a picture of our refrigerator in the photo album, you know it's not a full American style fridge, but neither is it a dormitory fridge. It's a sizable and heavy piece of equipment. Well the Chinese movers handled it as follows. One man stands in front of the fridge and pulls it on to his back. One of the the others helps him push it fully on to his back. AND THEN HE CARRIES IT ON HIS BACK DOWN FOUR FLIGHTS OF STAIRS. Likewise, when arriving at the new building, again he carries it on his back up 5 flights. I might add that we're not talking about Yao Ming here. This is a 5 foot 7 Chinese guy that can't weigh more than 145 lbs. They also carried our TV and our washing machine in this manner. To be honest, my heart was a little sick. A few days of that could ruin your back forever, and they probably do it every single day.

When the moving was over for the day, the movers had taken care of two foreign teacher apartments. The moving crew included 4 underlings and a boss. How much were they paid for their trouble? 160 Yuan, about $20 for the 5 of them. How ridiculously cheap. And I am quite sure they are happy to have the job - how many other able bodied Chinese men would take their position? Let's say that they make 30 Yuan per day in their moving job. That's only 900 Yuan per month, less than I take out from the ATM at one time.

I have one other new apartment anecdote for this post. Unlike our old apartment, our washing machine will not be in our bathroom. Every 2 floors they have a designated laundry room. The rooms have the requisite equipment - namely pipes to supply water and drains to accept the waste water. Unfortunately our Chinese friends made a critical error when designing the laundry room. The drains were elevated! The Chinese washing machines have a hose that you lay down on the floor to release the waste water. This means for the machine to effectively drain, the drain must be (at highest) on the ground level with the machine, and preferably at a lower level than the washer. But in our new laundry room it was the opposite. Luckily, they finally figured this out and put a BRICKS and MORTAR ledge in the laundry room, which they are then covering with tile. When placed on the new ledge, the machines should be able to drain properly. But why was the room so poorly designed to start with?

D - Movin' Out

2006-11-12T10:34:00.000+08:00

We have moved into new digs here in Dalian. The old foreign teacher building has been under renovation for several months now and they finally finished the work. Unfortunately, the DSL in the new apartment isn't up and running and probably won't be for several days. We came back to our old apartment this morning to use the internet (and watch Tennessee get waxed by Arkansas). Hopefully this will be the last outage! The new place looks nicer. It has better fixtures and nicer furniture. It's also cleaner and so far seems to be inhabited by fewer bugs. Unfortunately it's also freezing. Our old apartment isn't exactly cozy but for some reason seems to retain heat better. Well, that's all for now. Hopefully we will return to regular posting in a few days when all is well in the new foreign teacher building.

C - it's the most wonderful time of the year

2006-11-07T19:42:00.000+08:00

Lately it's been pretty cold here in our apartment, and D and I have both been frustrated that the heat has not yet been turned on. Yesterday it snowed, and I thought "Ha! They'll HAVE to turn the heat on now!" But no such luck.

With our apartment so cold, I've been spending most of my free time in bed under my very warm comforter. I get in bed with the intention of reading, studying, or grading papers, but of course, I always end up falling asleep. I haven't taken afternoon naps since I was a junior in college, and I'd forgotten how much I hate the feeling of waking up in the evening when it's dark. Sunset time here is quite early -- around 4:45 pm -- so I've experienced this uncomfortable feeling more often than I'd have liked to this week. Today was one of those days.

On top of the fogginess produced by my indulgent afternoon nap, I've got a mountain of paperwork to do for my students, since three of my seven classes are taking their final exam this week. It mainly consists of answering comprehension questions about the movie "Walk the Line", and I was amused to see that the students must have found the Wikipedia entry on the movie. (Incidentally, China just granted access to Wikipedia a few weeks ago, to which I alerted them -- the timing couldn't have been better for my students.) Some of them got the question "What causes Johnny Cash's interest in Folsom Prison?", to which they've all responded "A B-movie called 'Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison.'" I then asked them "Do you know what a B-movie is?" They, of course, did not. But I'm pleased to see them researching things on wikipedia. They haven't found the Chinese-language version yet, thankfully -- that would've made my final exam a lot easier!

D - Chills, Church, and Communists

2006-11-06T16:32:00.000+08:00

The high here in Dalian today is about 45 degrees fahrenheit, but it's been colder most of the day. The formerly temperate ocean breeze has turned into a bone chilling face slapper. I almost felt like I was in Rochester, NY (site of my university education and many a cold sprint to class). If weather.com can be trusted for China though, it will supposedly be 62 tomorrow. Ah the weather, go figure.

I have a few short stories to relate from China. Last Friday evening, I joined our Danish friends at their home for dinner. About a month ago they opted out of the school provided housing and now live in a relatively posh condo just up the road. The walk to school is a little longer but they have a bathroom to die for. Imagine this - the water from the shower actually goes into a shower specific drain. This is in stark contrast to our bathroom, where the shower floor and the bathroom floor are identical. Thus if someone needs to use the toilet subsequent to a recent shower, their pants will become soaked. To combat this problem, C had a brilliant idea - she picked up a squeegee (reminiscent of something you might use on your car windshield), which we employ when exiting the shower. In China, even simple things get a little more complicated than we are used to.

But I digress. Also invited to the dinner were another couple consisting of a late 30s/early 40s American businessman turned Oral English teacher (K), and his Chinese wife (B). He said he is principally teaching at DMU because it's easier to get a residence permit in China as a teacher than a foreign businessman. They met because she was his interpreter in his various business dealings in China, which they are still engaged in on the side. My impression is that while he teaches, she is running the import/export business. Anyway, they are good people and we had a lovely conversation at dinner and afterwards. Even the Chinese wine that was consumed was passable. One part of the night was a bit disturbing however. Although K is married to a Chinese woman and does all of his business with the Chinese, he has a very negative attitude towards China. After B shared one story with us, I could start to understand why. Her grandfather was a member of the KMT (Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek) before the Communists took over China. Unfortunately he was captured by the Communists and tortured repeatedly. They would put him on a stage with his arms behind his back in some contorted, painful positions, and then groups of people gathered in the audience would yell anti-KMT slogans and pro-Communist slogans. Apparently B's grandmother was forced to yell insults against her own husband and pretend that he was an enemy of the state. As B said "She did what she had to in order to survive." I can't fathom the world we live in sometimes.

Continuing on that note, our Danish friends relayed another scary story, this one more recent. Last Thursday they had the day off so they decided to take a couple of random buses and then just walk around Dalian to see what they could see. Apparently they ended up in a part of Dalian that is off limits because it's near a Chinese military submarine base, a fact of which they were ignorant. There were no signs indicating it was a forbidden area until right next to the base. When they saw the sign, they immediately turned around and left to go back towards the bus stop. Despite this, a couple of soldiers caught up with them and politely asked them to return to the base for some questions. They did so and they were briefly questioned by some soldiers who didn't have a strong command of English. Eventually they were kept waiting for 2 hours while the People's Security Bureau (PSB) aka Chinese "Secret Police" were called. Four very large gentlemen with an fluent translator showed up and questioned them further. They called DMU to confirm their story. They reviewed their passports which they most fortunately brought along. Our friends managed to maintain their calm, which I am sure expedited things in their favor. Eventually, the FAO from DMU came to pick them up. So nothing negative came of it but you can imagine how terrified they were. It's a reminder that while China may be improving, it has a long way to go.

On a different note, I went to church in China for the first time on Sunday. Along with our Canadian friends, I caught the bus downtown. Just off of Zhongshan Square, there was a tall building. We met some people outside and they led us up a few flights of stairs. There was a large room with perhaps 75 rows of 8 chairs each. They were very soft and comfortable and every seat was taken. At the front of the room there was a video projector showing the actual church sanctuary, which was down the street in an actual church like building which was apparently built by the Dutch (?). The church was a legal Protestant church operating with government sanction, and the whole service was conducted in Chinese. Two Chinese girls offered to translate for us. One sat between L and T (Canadians) and another sat next to me. During the hymns and the sermon she would lean over every minute or two and whisper the translation in English, which is certainly unique in my experience. I recognized the tune of some of the hymns but couldn't recall the names. The service was essentially 3 hymns, some Bible readings, the sermon, and a closing hymn. All in all, what you would call a pretty traditional service! The only thing they didn't do was take up an offering, which I had expected when they sung the doxology at the end of the service. The message was traditional as well, espousing standard Christian doctrines such as loving your enemies, loving and obeying God, and following Jesus. Apparently some of the young people at the church hold a study (in English) on Tuesday evenings near DMU, so I think I will check that out as well. It's one thing to visit a church in a place like the US where there's a cultural tradition for doing so, and another in a place like China where people are risking their necks and reputations. This I have to see.

C - day by day

2006-11-04T20:51:00.000+08:00

Lately I've been feeling incredibly happy to be in China. When I left our apartment to get some food for lunch this afternoon, everything smelled wonderful. First I smelled burning leaves, which were very autumnal and lovely, and then I smelled some sort of food being grilled or barbecued. Even though I wasn't really in the mood for Chinese food (I was en route to KFC, in fact) it still smelled delicious.

Then I walked a bit further up the road and was overwhelmed by the smell of, well, human waste.

Regardless, I'm quite pleased to be living here in China. It's such food for thought, because the cultural foundation is quite foreign to that of my own, and meanwhile no single political or social ideology is really prevailing because everything is changing so fast. It's impossible not to reconsider one's fundamental principles in a place like this. My mind is constantly churning out new theories and suggestions -- almost as fast as I can make observations.

I'm definitely a tad homesick, though. I've been telling myself that things are the same as they would be if I'd gone to Duke for law school this fall; I most likely would've last seen my family in mid-August and would be seeing them again at Christmastime. In that case, however, I at least would've been living in the United States, in a culture that I can make a bit more sense of, under a government that is currently troubling but not nearly as terrifying to me as China's. But if someone offered to wave a magic wand where our teaching contracts would go away and a free flight home and terrific 9-month job offer would appear, I wouldn't take it. There's too much to be learned here, and we just have to wade through it, homesickness and all. Or, as my mother would say, "put one foot in front of the other." And that's what we'll do.

Out of the saddle, back in the saloon

2006-11-01T16:58:00.000+08:00

This is just a quick post to share that C and I are internet-less in our apartment again. Despite all appearances that it should work, it's just not. Our Chinese friends are on the case but no resolution just yet. Thus, I am back in the Internet saloon. My eyes aren't watering yet though...

D - Questions on Contentment

2006-10-29T20:34:00.000+08:00

I fear for anyone continuing to read this blog for insights into China. With any luck, you will still find some but more and more our journey here is turning introspective. Our trip has been a great opportunity to learn about a foreign culture and people, but I never realized that being here would ultimately turn our thoughts inward. When you are in your home country, virtually everyone you speak with is a mirror. Since you share common cultural values it is easy not to question the assumptions that are being made in the everyday. In a foreign land however, those assumptions fall idle. You must confront your most basic precepts.

In the first post of this blog, I discussed my mild dissatisfaction with my work life prior to China. As I indicated then, it was easy for me to question the validity of my occupation. In America, an upper middle class person such as myself has the world open to them. I could get rich working at a large investment bank in New York. I could go back to school and become a history professor. I could get my MBA and command prestige. Maybe I could run for political office. There are so many choices it's a little overwhelming. But what if I didn't have so many choices? How would that change my perspective or life? If I was less than thrilled with what by all accounts was an excellent job, how would I feel stripped of opportunity and confined to one path?

In China (and everywhere except the middle crust and above in Western countries), people don't have a lot of choice. Even in the "new" China, if high school students don't get the requisite score on the China College Entrance Exam, they are relegated to factory work or service jobs for the rest of their lives.

As an example, there is a Chinese couple that owns a food stand just outside the Foreign Teacher Building here at DMU. Inside the food stand, they have a couple of fryers and a cutting board. Their stand is strategically located on the path between the DMU West Campus and the DMU East Campus, so they see quite a bit of foot traffic. Sometimes they both man their booth, sometimes it's just the husband, and others it's just the wife. She wears a red shirt that seems intended to suggest a fast food motif and tops it off with a red cap that I've never seen her doff. During the warmer months, he wore these tank top muscle shirts - and he could pull them off! He was pretty built although I don't think it was because of his gym membership. He probably has a manual labor job somewhere else. The thing I will always remember about him is the ever present smile on his face. He never seemed stressed or cross, even when students would throng around the booth at lunch time.

They offer two dishes. One is the Jian Bing Guo Zi, which they make by pouring batter on a flat fryer. Next they break an egg onto the batter, spread it around and then flip the pancake. Into the pancake they place green onions, two crispy flour shells, and a Chinese hot dog split in two. They fold this up into a pocket and voila. Dish number two is known as "han ba", aka the chicken hamburger. They put a fried chicken patty in a sesame roll with some lettuce and mayonnaise. Both of them are surprisingly good and have become regular staples in our diet. The price has something to do with it - the Jian Bing Guo Zi is 2 yuan and Han ba is 3 yuan. In China you can easily eat on a dollar a day if you really want to.

So why spend all that time describing two people that would be identified as having no significance in the world? Who will remember them for serving up fried chicken patties? Because they are two of the finest people I have ever met. I say that knowing them in the most cursory fashion. Our conversations in Chinese are basic to say the least. But when I see them work in that stand, day after day, I can see real contentment. There is no sense of resenting the work that they do. We've all seen it in a fast food place. The sullen eyes of the bored cashier who seems like they would rather be in the iron maiden than taking your order. And how many of us have thought in the back of our minds while gathering up our double cheeseburgers - "you know, I'd be miserable too if I were stuck behind that counter".

We're not breaking any new ground here, are we? Everyone knows that your job can't be your life and sometimes you have to grin and bear it. What's paradoxical about life is that you can know something in your mind but until you feel it and experience it for yourself it's not real. I think that's what China is doing for me. I have plenty of time to think here and at the same time I'm confronted by people who not only get by with less money but are incredibly contented doing so. That has a way of getting inside you.

I want to close this entry with a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a famous Russian author who survived the Soviet gulag and became a prominent writer and philosopher. He made many enemies criticizing both capitalism and communism.

"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism." - from "A World Split Apart", 1978

D - Odds and Ends

2006-10-26T19:47:00.000+08:00

The post rate on our blog has slowed a bit, as I'm sure regular readers have noticed. I haven't been feeling that well this week and there's been less to report. Nonetheless, there are a few odds and ends to report.

-Last Saturday we went out with a bunch of people to an Indian Restaurant in the Zhongshan Hotel on Jiefang Lu. The Hindu holiday of Diwali (I think it's their New Year) was Saturday and the one Indian foreign teacher suggested an outing. He is here for 3 months as part of an exchange program between his university, Kennesaw State College (Atlanta, GA area) and DMU. He's teaching management courses. Apparently DMU and KS have been doing this for a number of years. It sounds like a neat program and 3 months is long enough to get your feet wet without going mad. The food at the restaurant was decent. For 70 RMB each, we had access to an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. It was pretty standard Indian fare featuring various curries, plenty of naan, and strangely - french fries. I was disappointed there was no Chicken Tikka Masala but you take what you can get in China!

-My primary lesson for my classes this week was to teach them English words for discussing music. The principal focus of the class was explaining musical genres - such as rock, country, punk, ska, r&b, hip-hop/rap, folk, electronica, etc. The routine was for me to play 3 songs from a particular genre. For example, to illustrate HipHop/Rap I played some Black Eyed Peas, Dr. Dre, and Eminem. Then I would call on a student after each song ask them to say if they liked it or not and to compare it to their liking for other musical genres. Needless to say they were thrilled to get away from my standard English classes. I think only 1 or 2 students were sleeping! Interestingly, a lot of them liked country. But by far their biggest interest is in the mainstream Pop. They love the Backstreet Boys of all people. I tried to explain that Americans would laugh at 21 year Chinese men who love the Backstreet Boys, but I felt guilty making them feel bad. It's like telling your 5 year old that you're not actually the smartest person in the world.

-I've been feeling a strong desire to check out the international church here in Dalian. Chinese people of course can't openly attend services, but the PRC doesn't mind if the foreigners do their Jesus thing. We are told by a Canadian couple that there are house churches. 500 people will meet in tiny sweltering churches for 3 hours on Sundays. Ironically the international church is shepherded by a Korean pastor. Those who know us well are aware that our last church in New Jersey was predominantly Korean. The problem is that the church is a long way out in downtown from where we are. That shouldn't be an obstacle but when it involves riding a packed Chinese bus for 45 minutes it makes you hesitate. I think C and I are going to make the trip soon though. Maybe not this weekend though because I feel like I've been run over by a rickshaw.

D - Truth and Freedom

2006-10-22T12:08:00.000+08:00

I can't claim credit for one of the most interesting observations I've heard while being in China. C has remarked on several occasions that Americans may have a mistaken impression about freedom. We believe that every person in the world is longing for American-style freedom. They may whisper about their desire in dark corners to avoid the secret police, but it exists. To an extent, I agree with this common American belief. The desire to be free is a part of human nature. Most of us just want to be left alone to live our lives how we see fit.

It may surprise many in the West however to learn that ordinary Chinese people don't share this belief, and it's not simply a matter of being afraid of their government. People here are incredibly accepting of their lot in life. While Americans commonly rage against the machine - by protesting on the National Mall or even just cursing Uncle Sam around the kitchen table, the Chinese do not. In class this week, we were practicing words and phrases for expressing opinions - e.g. "I'm for it" / "I'm against it" / "I support this" / "I'm opposed to this". First, I taught the students the words and gave examples. Next, I would write an issue on the board and they would have to write down if they were for it, against it, or didn't care - and why. For example, I wrote things like "smoking in public places", "taxes on beer and liquor", "women in the military" - relatively benign issues I thought they could easily have an opinion on. It's not like I asked them if Taiwan should be an independent state (which will get you a lynch mob and deportation in China).

Well, you would have thought I had three heads. "You want us to express an opinion? What?! But we don't know how to do that!" Before asking individual students about their opinions, I would try to help them develop their democratic impulses by asking the "For"s to raise their hands and the "Against"s to raise their hands. You know, see where public opinion lay. Both times I would get a smattering of hands - but not anywhere near the total number of students in the class. "Do you understand what I am saying?" "Yes we do." "Then why aren't you raising your hands?" The concept of expressing your opinion actively was so foreign to them. They almost seemed embarrassed to have one. I'm sure the language barrier has something to do with it but I don't believe it can account for the reluctance they showed. After repeatedly haranguing them about giving me their opinions the general consensus was that smoking in public should be illegal, there should be no tax on beer, and women should serve in the military along with men. Another interesting aspect of the discussion was that they were much more loathe to talk about women in the military - presumably because it's the only thing the government has a clear opinion on (they are pro-equality, woot!).

Anyway, at the end of one of my For & Against classes, I asked them if they liked the War on Iraq. Of course unanimously, they were against it. They asked my opinion and I talked about my dismay with how things have been done and how they are going.

"Do you think it is strange I disagree with my government over the war?". "Not at all!" they said - you are right, it is a bad thing. "But my government says we should continue to fight!" "It doesn't matter, you are right." So I asked if anyone in the room ever disagreed with the Chinese government. Dead silence. Finally I asked one of the students that speaks English well if he ever disagreed with his leaders - he need not tell me where his areas of disagreement were - just that he did. He indicated there were some things so I inquired why he wasn't trying to change the government's policy. "There is no point - I have no ability to change things". And that sums up our interactions in a nutshell. The people here are not idiots. They have opinions about their government, mostly positive but certainly they are aware of failures and poor policies. But Chinese culture has an incredibly strong acceptance of things as they are. They don't get bent out of shape like Americans do. The idea of the Republicans getting thrown out of power this November would blow them away.

On the other hand, people here do want to know the truth. Last week we went to a Korean restaurant with S (student volunteer/best Chinese friend). After dinner we were walking home and she told us a story about one of her friends. This friend gave her a video of the Tian'anmen Square confrontation in 1989 and told her to watch it behind closed doors. She was struck that students could get so angry with their government. How could it be that they could try and fight the government? Her explanation? Someone put them up to it. It wasn't an independent movement. Maybe Taiwanese or Tibetan spies forced them to rebel. The concept of spontaneous revolt was untenable - the idea that Chinese people would break out of their cultural deference seemed impossible. At the same time, I understand. You grow up your whole life being fed the stories of the greatness of your government. It's infallible and always has the best interests of the Chinese people at heart. Yet despite the conflict between her education and the facts of 1989, no amount of education could steal her desire for truth.

S comes and tutors us in Chinese once a week and we return the favor and help her with her English compositions. I decided to take a risk and offer to print off the independent account of the Tian'anmen Square event from Wikipedia (which even has a Chinese language version). She very much wanted the account. C was reluctant given how dangerous this was for us - we could get fired from our university and deported or worse for supplying her with this information. She promised not to tell anyone, just to read it privately.

It's an interesting dynamic between truth and freedom. Maybe we have it a little backwards. Perhaps the desire for freedom does lie in every human heart - as is oft spoken about America's efforts to democratize the world. But I am beginning to believe though that the stronger power is truth. As the light of truth pierces the darkness and touches the human mind, change can and will come to China.

They will know the truth and the truth will set them free.

C - a dinner to remember

2006-10-16T06:51:00.000+08:00

Since we first met the student that was assigned to help D and I learn how to function in Dalian, she's mentioned the possibility of us having dinner with her parents at their home. (Her parents live in Dalian, so unlike many of her classmates, our friend doesn't have to undertake a multiple-day train ride to get to school in the fall.) Apparently this past weekend was convenient for all parties involved, so plans were made for us to be picked up at our apartment and driven to her parent's apartment by her father. I was terribly nervous about this meeting, and since D and I seemed to be both coming down with a cold, I thought we could put it off awhile longer. No such luck, though -- D confirmed the plans when he saw Sylvia the day before for the banking fiasco.

The dinner ended up being held at a restaurant, since Sylvia's aunt, uncle, and cousin apparently also wanted to have a peek at the long-nosed white devils (hehe, kidding) that their niece was spending so much time with, and her parents' apartment wasn't large enough to hold eight people. Her parents chose a seafood restaurant, the kind where you pick your own food while it's still alive and kicking. We find it hard enough to choose dishes given our limited exposure to Chinese cuisine and usually prefer the natives to order for us, so imagine our difficulty overcoming both our lack of knowledge of what's good and what's bad AND our feeling that we were in some sort of aquarium or zoo instead of a restaurant.

We eventually selected some dishes and ultimately had a delicious dinner. Of course, the evening wouldn't be complete without a few social gaffes on my part. Upon learning that Sylvia's aunt was an economics professor, I insensitively asked "So do you think China's currency should be allowed to float on the open market?" But this is essentially asking her aunt whether she toes the party line or not, which of course she does. I've found that even if a Chinese individual isn't a party member, they're not comfortable showing disagreement with the CCP while in the presence of a foreigner.

Then I had the insatiable urge to pick some food out of my teeth, which is apparently the number-one no-no when it comes to Chinese table manners. Every website on Chinese manners that I've even seen clearly states that if one must use a toothpick, the mouth should be covered by the non-picking hand. Well, despite reading it a dozen times in the past few months, I forgot this rule, and even though I don't think anyone noticed, I still felt dumb.

One good thing that happened during the dinner was being called by our Chinese names. (D's is 长天，pronounced sort of like "chahng tee-en", and mine is 秋水, pronounced sort of like "chew shway"). Our names come from a line of a famous chinese poem and are very romantic, because the poem says that in the fall, the water and sky combine to form one color. (秋水共长天一色). But our names don't get a lot of use, so it was fun to see them serving their purpose.

And here is a photo of the happy dining party:

Sylvia is on D's left, her parents are next to me, and her aunt and uncle are to their right.

D - Banking in the Mirror Universe

2006-10-14T14:37:00.000+08:00

Some of the poor souls that know us are aware of our affection for Star Trek in its various forms. Before you reach for the "Close" button, I promise the Trek-related portion of this post will be over shortly, so bear with me. Some episodes of Star Trek feature a concept known as the "Mirror Universe". The Mirror Universe contains the same characters, ships, places, and concepts as the regular universe where the heroes dwell - except that everything and everyone in the Mirror Universe is twisted. For example, rather than Earth being part of a peace-loving interstellar Federation, in the mirror universe, bloodthirsty humans seek to destroy and enslave other planets. And as the following pictures of Spock show, people in the Mirror Universe have more facial hair.

Normal Spock

Mirror Spock

Okay, okay - I'm getting there! You're asking "what does this pointless Star Trek trivia have to do with China?" Well, my experience at the Bank of China on Friday of this week was a bit like banking in the mirror universe. Everything looks and sounds the same. The BoC features 5 tellers. They have savings accounts, they have checking accounts, they advertise Certificates of Deposit. China has ubiquitous ATMs dotting the landscape of every town and city. Oh yes, it looks quite normal but in fact evil is lurking just beneath the surface.

First, a little background before I get to the meat of my suffering. C and I did not have to open our Bank of China accounts. We simply showed up to the Foreign Affairs Officer's room at the University one day and she handed us our ATM cards, PIN numbers, and bank books. On the appointed day our salary was automatically deposited in the bank account. We used the ATM and our PIN worked and we got money. It couldn't have been easier. Life was good.

Then one dark day I was in a bit of a hurry. My friends and family know that I am a bit absent-minded. I am actually quite thorough with most things but if my mind gets occupied or I am worried about being late somewhere, all my usual exacting detail goes out the window. Yes, I lost my ATM card like an idiot. I've been banking in the US for 9 years and I have NEVER lost my ATM card. But because we're in China and banking in the mirror universe, I of course managed to do so here. I take full responsibility - it's not the Bank of China's fault that I was careless.

So I called the Foreign Affairs Officer and explained the situation, confident that she would grease the wheels of financial service as she had before. She indicated that all I needed to do was to take two copies of my passport to the bank on campus and they would take care of it. Ah good - that sounds easy. I asked our student volunteer Sylvia to go with me since my finance Chinese is sorely lacking. Upon our arrival she explained the situation to the teller who indicated the following stipulations.

1) All lost card requests must be submitted prior to 3:30 PM
2) The lost card request must be written out in Chinese
3) The lost card request must be written by the person who wants the new card.
At the time, it was 4pm so we couldn't submit the request that day. The following day Sylvia and I returned, this time at 2pm. We gave the teller my passport copies. The copies were not full size -- they were slightly smaller than my actual passport. She had to call someone to confirm they were usable, and thankfully they were. Next, she gave us two forms to fill out and sternly instructed Sylvia that I MUST write it myself or it could not be accepted. We took several copies of the form so Sylvia could fill one out and I could do my best to emulate her writing. The first few parts of the form weren't too bad but eventually some VERY complex characters were required and I made a mistake. Well, it turns out that you can't scratch anything out on the form. If you make even the smallest error, you MUST fill out a new form - they cannot accept a damaged one. Sylvia realized that if we kept going at our snail's pace we would never finish by 3:30pm. Our new strategy was for her to fill the form out with her left hand. It would look different from her normal handwriting and crude enough to pass for a foreigner that had no idea what he was writing.

The process went like this - we waited for a customer to be served by our particular teller, then Sylvia would fill the form out with her left hand, while I would pretend to be writing on a separate sheet of paper. We finished those two forms...then were handed another 3 to fill out! We were essentially filling out the same information over and over, just in different forms. One was the "I lost my card" form, another was the "Please give me a new one" form, and yet another was the "Authorize an investigation of the loss of the card" form. They were endless. Oh -- and the forms must be filled out with black ink. We did one form in blue and it was rejected. In another instance, the forms had carbon copies attached but Sylvia's left-hand Chinese didn't press all the way through to the last sheet - we had to do it again.

Finally we finished all the forms after an hour and 15 minutes...just inside the 3:30 deadline. The teller asked Sylvia repeatedly if I had filled out the forms. "Of course!" she answered - which was partially true. I did write the account numbers, my english name, and the date. I am so glad they didn't ask me...I am the worst liar.

Some of you may read that and think it's not that surprising. We've all been in situations with large bureaucracies and dealt with paper pushers and silly rules that don't make sense. The bank teller said I had to fill the form because some Chinese person had a stolen a foreigner's money by filling out such a form and tricking them. I argued that I had to trust that Sylvia was writing the correct things anyway - it was a useless precaution. I think what is instructive about this event is the comparison of Chinese business and American business. I can remember when I worked in New York at a large investment bank. EVERYTHING is about efficiency. Don't have 6 forms when 1 will do. Make it easier for the customer and faster for the company. Make it require fewer people. Who knows, maybe it's just as bad to get a new ATM card in the US - not sure since it hasn't happened to me. And yes, US corporations do take security seriously at the same time they put things online and streamline how routine tasks like new ATM cards are handled. But the mentality here is totally different. Processes in China are designed to incorporate more people rather than fewer.

It's funny, on occasion the extra people required for every task in China are good for the customer. Sometimes you get better service because there are so many people looking out for you. Most of the time though, it's inefficiency for inefficiency's sake. C and I both laugh at the grocery stores here -- EVERY single aisle has an employee in it, ostensibly to help you find what you need in that aisle, but more likely the purpose is to give the people jobs. Perhaps they'll be bored to tears because they get to talk to only one customer a day, but at least they won't be staring down tanks or complaining they can't read the news everyone else in the world gets to read.

D - Being There

2006-10-11T13:21:00.000+08:00

When you move to a new country, you feel like you're living on Mars for awhile. Everything is unique and different. The smallest comment from a native can generate a laugh or an insightful comment into the subtle differences separating your two countries. Eventually though, you settle in. You develop a routine. The place isn't home, but you carve out a niche and find some local comforts, or maybe spend a little too much money buying some from your homeland. You never forget that you're in a foreign place, but you adjust.

I think that's the point that C and I have hit this week. Our families know that we've been struggling a bit with teaching - and no matter where you are or what you're doing, your job is a big part of your life. If it's a struggle then the whole of your existence can be trying at times. The lesson here is pretty straightforward. No matter where you go and no matter what you do, you've got to find the something more that makes life worthwhile. For us, that's our faith and our family and a belief that every experience in life has a purpose. We're not in China just because it's a great place to be a tourist and I can assure it's not because we love teaching English to unmotivated Chinese university students. Just like everything else, it's preparing us for some future step in life.

It's weeks like this where I dwell on these things, primarily because I am pretty frustrated with teaching. You'll find a number of different attitudes from the other English teachers. Some of them don't care much at all. They do what they have to get by and little more. Others like teaching and spend all class long playing games but I am not convinced they ever teach the students anything. Finally, the last set actually care to impart knowledge to the students but are frustrated to no end by the peculiarities of trying to teach English here. I won't lie - I have been in each category. Sometimes in the same day my attitude will shift from to the other.

Here's why teaching here can be difficult-
1) Skill level varies tremendously between students. The freshmen I have are closer in ability than the juniors but it's still a wide range.
2) The students lack a tremendous amount of vocabulary. Our class is Oral English I. The book we use is primarily to get students to speak and to practice pronunciation. And that's all well good but it's hard to have even a basic conversation if you don't know certain words. But I don't have a vocabulary book to use to teach them with even if I could incorporate it.
3) Students almost NEVER raise their hand. At first I didn't mind calling on people but it's really frustrating after awhile when you ask really easy yes or no questions and not a single person will bother. You have to call on them every time.
4) You can plan a very detailed lesson and have it fail. Teaching requires a lot of effort. You have to plan and then present in class. Then in class you have to adjust on the fly to how students are responding. Are they learning? Is it interesting? Do I need to move to something else if they don't like this, or do I force them to do it?

My mother is a teacher and I know she is a good one. Being here has given me even more respect for her than I had before. And she teaches "at-risk" youth, which makes teaching ESL look like a day at the beach. Teaching is not easy! I am now amazed at the good teachers and professors I had in school and in college. And now I understand why the bad ones were bad. When you work a 9-5, you can have a good hour at work and produce something that made the whole 8 hours worthwhile. As a teacher, you prepare beforehand, then you have to present the preparation well. Finally, you have to give good out of class assignments and deal with grading them. If you fail at any step along the way, they don't learn - and to top it off, you may feel awkward in class knowing that the lesson is a partial failure. Teaching is the curse of caring. I used curse there primarily for the alliteration - but it often feels like those who long to do good are fighting an uphill battle.

My hometown newspaper has a regular column called "The Vent" where people call in to express their frustration about some local (usually insignificant) issue. I guess this is my Vent entry! I don't think they will publish it in the China Daily though.

C - on absorbing (culture) shock

2006-10-07T19:51:00.000+08:00

Sometimes I feel that China is a rubik's cube that I'm ever so slowly putting in order. Week by week, I notice that the signs and billboards are revealing more and more bits of their meaning and that conversations are becoming less and less unintelligible to me. It's a good feeling.

It's exhilarating to feel the blinders coming off, the clouds clearing up, the little mysteries being solved. Every little thing I figure out fuels my motivation to keep studying, keep practicing, keep trying. But then China gets in the way. Just when I start to feel even moderately adjusted, confident, and content, China finds some new way to offend, annoy, horrify, or confound me. And then I don't want to talk to ANY Chinese people, and if I don't want to do that, why would I study the language?

But the point of this entry is not to rant about Chinese culture. I do that vicariously through talktalkchina.com. The thought that's been brewing in my head all day is amazement at the people I know whose parents (or they themselves as children) emigrated from China or Korea. I knew in my mind that these cultures were different from that of the United States, but living here in China has caused me to grasp more fully the enormity of the fundamental incompatibility that exists between East and West.

At our old church in New Jersey (www.emetro.org), we met and became friends with a good amount of first-generation Americans. These people were proud of their Asian heritage and (rightfully) considered it an important part of their identity, but I didn't feel an enormous gulf separating us like the one that exists between me and the Chinese people here in China. Sometimes I feel like I have absolutely nothing in common with the people here.

Obviously my friends' parents felt they weren't completely incompatible with life in the US if they moved their family there, but I'm amazed at the open-mindedness both they and their children seem to possess in order to be able to function in both cultures. So, P, J, A/Y, S/P, S, K, Y, and anyone else I might have failed to think of, if you're reading this, please know that I think you guys are amazing. Right now I need to take a lesson from your great example!

D - Shenyang Concluded

2006-10-07T09:46:00.000+08:00

We have returned from Xi'an and I'm still writing about Shenyang. When you have a lot to work on and a lot to say it's easy to get behind. I finally decided to use the Google Picasa Photo Albums so now we can just upload all our pictures and you can view them at your leisure. The general link to all our photos will be this and the Shenyang specific link is here.

I want to close out Shenyang with a video. It's the usual handheld herky-jerky-likely-to-make-you-ill variety, but it will give you a sense of the energy that a Chinese city can have. The energy is why many people come to China. Even in New York City, it's hard to find the same kind of excitement and adrenaline. The street in Shenyang featured hundreds of people milling about - shopping, talking, laughing, eating. Some western cities have one-off events that feature this level of atmosphere but in China it happens everyday. If you hate crowds, it can be maddening but if you let go of your personal space for a few minutes it can be truly exhilarating. The night markets in China are quite a sight. The peddlers have DVDs, socks, bras, candy, cell phones, terra cotta soldiers, and trinkets out the wazoo.

Without further ado, the video.

D - On the road again

2006-10-01T07:49:00.000+08:00

Well, now we're headed to Xi'an with our Danish friends. I haven't even finished uploading the entries about Shenyang...but what can you do. We will be back next Thursday evening with another boatload of pictures. With our additional classes this last week time was at a premium, but fear not loyal readers, we will continue posting for your vicarious China enjoyment.

Until then
再见

D - Shenyang Part 2 - The Exposition

2006-09-30T08:15:00.000+08:00

After getting off the train Friday night, we found a very nice taxi driver to take us to our hotel. He was Shenyangese and claimed he could be an excellent tour guide. Sylvia judged him to be trustworthy so we invited him to pick us up at 8am the next morning to take us to the Exposition. The Expo was located about 15km east of Shenyang city and was surrounded by a very beautiful countryside. Only the faint tinge of brown on the horizon could detract from the views around the Expo grounds.

The Exposition began at the end of May and continues through the end of October 2006. So we were catching it at the end of its life. Despite this, overall it was a good experience. One thing you have to remember when judging it is that it's in China. In other words, even if the presentation is bad, it would be good, because we're learning how other people do things and what exhibits are interesting to their mind. Anyway, I would liken it almost more to a World's Fair than a Horticultural Exposition. There were two main categories of sites - Chinese Domestic Exhibitions and International Exhibitions. Each site had plants and gardens from the respective region or country, but there were also stores selling (supposedly) unique items from their culture. Strange how Malaysia, Thailand, and Myanmar all seemed to be selling the same stuff! Of course, my favorite display was put on by Turkey. They didn't actually setup a garden or sell any kitsch, but they grilled up some mean mutton kebabs - very tasty! Our only non-food purchase of the day was made at the India garden where C picked up some incense.

And here are the pictures...starting with the entrance to the exposition. We have many more than this but I still haven't found a photo gallery site I like yet.

Some interesting tree root art

Doing a "Miao" dance in front of a prototypical "Miao" home

One of the many China Regional Gardens. Who's the funny white guy?

Chinese sentiments can seem cheesy to a Westerner

Something you won't see at a US Exposition: A North Korean booth

The Lily Tower built for the exposition

Something else you won't see at a US Exposition: a ropes course??

The Dutch Garden sporting some Van Gogh

The American garden seeks to educate about great American leaders like Washinglon and Einstin.

Sylvia and Cassie hanging out in front of the Italian garden

A rose is a rose

D - Shenyang Part 1 - The Train

2006-09-27T15:04:00.000+08:00

Well we have returned successfully from our first intra-China travel experience. It began Friday afternoon when we met our student volunteer Sylvia and her roommate Cassie at the closest bus stop. We took the 502 downtown and got off near the train station, which was the haven of madness we expected. Not only was it packed to the brim with everyday Chinese travellers, but there were hundreds of soldiers everywhere, apparently headed off from Dalian to fill the train station of another city. We were about an hour early for the train so we hung out in the waiting area. There were probably a 1000 people milling about where we were and we felt like every single one of them was staring at us. People would be minding their own business and then make a sudden veer our way. They would inquire in Chinese with our friends as to where we were from and what we were doing. Sylvia explained that many people who travel by train are farmers who may have never seen a foreigner before - and I believe it. The tickets for our friends to Shenyang were 15 RMB - about $1.90! China's train system make it possible for even the poorest to get transportation.

Right before we headed to get on the train at 3:30, I decided to hit the WC. Now the bathroom in any public place like the train station is never nice, but this was a whole new level of unniceness. Actually, the bathroom itself was no worse than your average interstate rest stop, but the air was literally like breathing pure tobacco smoke. You can't smoke in the train station central area (and it's actually enforced), but I know where they go to get their fix! Ugh. Finally, we got on the train. Sadly, we don't have any pictures of the station or the train. From the outside, it was a pale green and looked every bit to be from a bygone communist era. I should add that we took the 2209 train, which is the slowest and least comfortable train. From what I read, there are some very nice trains here but our students of course chose the most economic option.

There are four classes of seats on most Chinese trains: hard seats, soft seats, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper - if you're curious on the distinctions, click here. The picture of the hard seats (our class) is relatively close to our experience with a few exceptions. For example, MANY people in China will stand in the hard seat compartments for incredibly long journeys. Having an aisle seat isn't as advantageous when you have people roaming up and down hoping to find a spare seat, or maybe just leaning on your seat. I was talking to a student today and he told me that to get from his home in central China to Dalian, he would STAND for 22 hours. Another girl got to sit on her train journey to Dalian, but it took 50 hours from her home in Gansu province.

Thankfully we didn't need the restroom on the train so I can't report any findings there. Our dinner consisted of ramen noodles brought by our friends. You can get hot water on the train to make that sort of ready-to-eat dish. The journey itself was okay - there were probably 6 or 7 stops of 3-10 minutes on the way to Shenyang. My bottom was certainly ready to get off though at the 6 hour and 15 minute mark when we arrived at the Shenyang North train station.

D - Holy Shenyang Batman!

2006-09-21T21:19:00.000+08:00

Well, this entry will be the last for a few days. We're one week away from our trip to Xi'an and somehow we managed to get another trip together. Our student volunteer was going to the International Horticultural Exposition in Shenyang, China this weekend with her roommate and we asked her if we could tag along. Shenyang is a heavily industrial city about 6 hours north of Dalian by train. The pronunciation sounds like "Shunyahng" according to the Chinese pinyin phonetic system. It's the capital of Liaoning province. Once known as Mukden, it was a hub of industry setup by the Japanese during their occupation of Manchuria during the second Sino-Japanese War. Throughout the 60s and 70s it was among the most successful industrial cities in China, but as market reforms took place in the 80s and 90s it fell behind some of the other cities. It's supposed to be rather dirty and polluted so I suspect this exposition is an effort to try and rebuild some of its reputation.

Ironically, my father has actually been to Shenyang. He gave a speech that was broadcast on state TV in the mid 90s. He gives an interesting description of his visit there. His company was investing about $50,000 in a local Chinese firm, which is pretty small. The hosts of his visit however went all out with a huge banquet and celebration at this magnificent occasion of Sino-American partnership!

The trip will see a number of firsts for me (C is far more Chinaperienced with her study abroad trip so this is old hat for her).

First stay at a Chinese hotel
First train trip in China
First visit to Shenyang
First trip with Chinese friends

One of the firsts I hope to avoid is - "First time using a squat toilet while going around a curve on a Chinese train"!

Some maps from the exposition web site are below...in English.

C - worth a thousand characters

2006-09-21T21:17:00.000+08:00

Before we take off for the weekend, here are some pictures from our latest adventures:

At Noah's For Your Ark bar, which D alluded to in his previous post, we came across this very special menu:

The picture isn't the greatest, but if you click on the photo and view it full-sized, you can clearly view the many humorous offerings, not the least of which is "peach pai" ("pai" would be pronounced "pie" in the Chinese phonetic system.) What really takes the cake (or pai, perhaps) for me, though, is #9 -- BBQ wikipedia. I knew that the Chinese government didn't like the thing, but jeez! This is a bit cruel!
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China is corrupting my value system. Two American businesses I've consciously objected to buying from for years, KFC and Wal-mart, are now something I treasure and look forward to patronizing! I realized the extent of my depravity the other day while throwing KFC take-out containers into a plastic bag from Wal-mart we're using for garbage:

Sad.

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I've been wanting a Chinese scroll painting for some time, so our student volunteer, Sylvia, took us to a mall downtown last Friday. I was able to find a beautiful painting and a very pretty fan. Each item cost 50 yuan, or just over 6 USD. I am very pleased with both:

The photos don't give a very good sense of scale, so I'll guess that the painting is 10" x 30", and the fan is probably just over a foot wide.
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This next photo is of a bizarre food made from potato that is apparently exclusive to Dalian. It's pretty tasty. I forget the name of it, but here you can see me chopping up what was left over after Sylvia made it for us the night before:

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And finally, a delightful photo I took just now of my dearest darling D:

He was feeling pretty bad this evening after finding out that he hugely offended our student volunteer by offering to pay for the hotel we booked for our trip to Shenyang, and then I had to ask him for computer help afterwards, which always puts him in a rather, how shall we say, brusque mood, so he wasn't exactly inclined to take a silly picture. I REALLY thought that the cookies he was eating looked like cigars, though, and after some pleading on my part he agreed to put his feet up on his desk and "smoke". And that is why I love him.

D - Socializing with Chinese characteristics

2006-09-20T12:22:00.000+08:00

Well, this has been an easy week for me. Currently I have 4 sections of students. 2 of those sections only have 1 class this week (8-9:30 Friday and 10-11:30 Friday), and the other 2 sections have shipped off to the island of Hainan for some hands on ship training. While my charges are enjoying the cramped splendor of a Chinese freighter, this means I have Monday through Thursday totally off. Really it's just the calm before the storm. Next week the freshmen, who have been marching around the first 5 weeks of school for required military training, will begin their class for the semester. The impact for us is that our measly 8-9 hours a week of teaching will rise to 12, 14, and finally 16 during certain weeks. It won't be too bad though because now we have a few lesson plans stored up.

So what have we been up to the last few days? Well last week we were conferring with our Danish friends about our trip to Xi'an when one of the student volunteers stopped by. She wanted to formalize the group of students who help the foreign teachers and students into a "Student Union" (Club) and she needed a good name. We bandied about several ideas but eventually she settled on my suggestion - "Foreign Friendship Volunteers". The criteria were that the name be "easy to remember" but "clearly state what our purpose is". Now in Chinese, this is easy - slap down 3 or 4 characters and you can tell the history of a dynasty it seems. In English though, you need a lot of letters!

Once the name was chosen, this volunteer wanted to organize a party for the students and the foreigners to celebrate the official kick-off of the student union. We helped draft their advertisements which were sent out via email and posted on the outside of the foreign teachers building. Well last Saturday was the day for the big event. It took place in the Student Activity Center on campus. The volunteers had a staffed bar serving (warm) beer and soda, and a nicely appointed dance floor replete with the requisite disco balls, light patterns, and spotlights. The evening kicked off with several dance performances. A few Chinese girls did some hip hop, while there was even a bit of Latin dancing from an older Chinese couple, who were followed by their younger proteges. There were two vocal performances in English by the winners of their equivalent to the American Idol contest at DMU. They also managed to talk Derek, a foreign teacher into playing the guitar and singing a few songs - he regaled the Chinese students with Oasis and John Denver. He had quite the singing voice, I was impressed. The evening continued with a bit of slow dancing. C and I were recruited on to the dance floor, but separately. I tried to dance with some Chinese girl, and some Chinese guy tried to show her the dance. Sadly we were not too successful but at least we gave it try. Finally, the rest of the evening was caught up in an epileptic's worst nightmare as the Chinese students flooded the dance floor to break it down to the world's best english techno. Apparently dancing all night to electronica is the Chinese night life, although they didn't so much dance as rotate in concentric human circles.

We topped off Saturday night with a brief visit to "Noah's: For your ark bar" with a few of the foreign teachers. We had some Asahi (very dry Japanese beer) and enjoyed some pizza from their oven, which wasn't all bad. All in all it was a good night. The student volunteers did a great job putting the event together on incredibly short notice. They are really great to us. All the teachers keep raving about the students. DMU should really advertise that the student volunteers exist - without them this experience would not be the great thing that it's been so far. We are certainly getting better at navigating with our limited Chinese but there are times it is invaluable to have a fluent speaker. It's also just a great cultural exchange. For example, we needed to go to the post office to mail our absentee voting request to our districts back in the US. We asked our volunteer to help us mail them. "Could you give us some help, we're trying to VOTE?"

On the way to the post office our volunteer remarked that it would be very expensive for 1.3 billion Chinese to vote in an election. A very astute economic observation no doubt, but nothing good comes cheap!

C - on a heavier note

2006-09-16T09:17:00.000+08:00

You can easily judge the character of a man by the way he treats those who can do nothing for him. -- Unknown

For the past several days, I have been unable to practice Chinese, develop lesson plans, reply to emails, or work on my law school applications. Any higher-level thought processes I might be capable of have been completely overwhelmed by my aching heart and screaming conscience.

In my ninth grade “Global Studies” class, I learned about the sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and abandonment of baby girls that takes place at astonishing levels in China. The stories of these practices made an impression on me like nothing else ever had. Even though it would be years before I would hear of feminism, I instinctively felt that there was something very wrong with valuing girls less than boys, and certainly it was downright evil to murder baby girls simply because they are girls.

That day’s lessons have stayed with me. In fact, what I learned in that class has in large part motivated my current year-long relocation to China. What I was completely unaware of until recently, however, was that the Chinese customs that privilege males over females are actually used as justification for the unhealthy attitudes toward girls. The customs aren’t questioned, and since the values are based on the customs, how could the values be wrong? I’ve had this argument made to me half a dozen times, and in none of the instances did the other person ever think to consider that perhaps the customs are inappropriate as well. “Thinking outside the box” is not a very Chinese thing to do, apparently.

Speaking about these cultural phenomena on a sociological level, though, isn’t what’s been keeping me up at night. What makes my heart ache is to hear a beautiful, intelligent girl tell me that it doesn’t bother her that her grandparents love her male cousin more, just because he’s male, or to see my immature and lazy (male) students act so smugly superior day in and day out. The young women at this university, even those who don’t have boyfriends and are otherwise unconcerned with marriage and parenthood, desperately want to have a son in the future. They don’t see anything wrong with preferring males; in fact, given their culture, it would be illogical not to prefer males.

Some cultural differences, such as music, food, fashion, etiquette, etc, are completely relative, and any preference for one culture over another would simply be a matter of individual taste. I would defend these aspects of Chinese culture to the end against any Westerner who thinks that their culture is superior. Anyone who knows me knows that I am the opposite of an arrogant, idiotic American who believes that the whole world should be like the USA. For me to be so upset, then, this must be a matter of a different sort.

I believe that the quote located at the beginning of this entry is true. Even if the Chinese customs that disadvantage females were immutable (although I don’t believe that they are), it’s still not right for females to be valued less. They can’t pass on your family name? Won’t be expected to live with you in your old age? Can’t work the land as hard? Can’t give you your “own” grandchildren? Love them equally anyways. Value them equally anyways. Even better would be to change the customs that have created the preference of sons over daughters, but if that isn’t possible, it’s still no excuse to prefer males. Letting the girls live is just the first step. The preference, in and of itself, is what I am taking issue with.

Think of the precedent that is set by the kind of thinking that values girls less than boys. If we as humans value others only to the extent that they are helpful and useful to us, we exchange our humanity for a cold, calculating kind of utilitarianism that creates a world I don’t think any of us would want to live in. We all have shortcomings and flaws, but instead of bearing with one another in patience and love, we would simply lower our view of the offending party’s level of innate worth according to the extent we were harmed by it.

The choice is either to value other human beings for their innate dignity, worth, and personhood, or diminish humanity altogether: those devalued for obvious reasons, and those doing the de-valuing by being allowed to develop such selfish patterns of thought. I don’t know if this aspect of Chinese culture will ever change. All I know is that I’m deeply troubled, and that I seem to be the only person here who is.

D - Xi'an or bust

2006-09-16T08:09:00.000+08:00

Well C and I have decided to go to the city of Xi'an for 十一（10/1 - The Chinese National Holiday). We get a week off from school and we didn't want to putter around campus for 7 days thinking about all the cool places we could be going.

Dalian has been a real success story for us in terms of a place to live. The air IS actually clean. It is a modern, accessible city and there's Western food when we think we can't take another bowl of rice. As expected, however, it completely lacks in the culture department. There's a few museums here and there but nothing that speaks to China's long history. The only place remotely close that qualifies is the city to the south of Dalian known as Lushun. There's a former Japanese prison where many Chinese were killed and they turned it into a museum on the occupation. Of course Lushun is also home to the Chinese Navy so parts of the city are forbidden to foreigners. Until we find someone who knows Lushun well we will probably avoid it so we don't have an uncomfortable meeting with a Chinese policeman.

So, Xi'an -- what's there? Well, Xi'an was the first capital of China and the home of the first emperor. A brutal but intelligent dictator named Qin Shi Huang united the warring clans of China into a single Chinese empire spanning much of modern China. As seems par for the course for ancient dictators, Mr Qin (Chinese surnames come first) decided he wanted to live forever, so he commissioned hundreds of sailors to go searching for the islands of eternal youth. Not surprisingly, they didn't come back - his response to their lack of results would not have been favorable. Failing to obtain eternal life through the usual means, Qin realized he must build a tremendous army to protect him in the afterlife. Thus he commanded the construction of the Terra Cotta soldiers, a massive group of life-size soldiers and generals surrounding his tomb. Qin likely shortened his lifespan by consuming mercury pills, which were thought to provide immortality. He spent so many resources of his empire on building the Terra Cotta soldiers that his reign was increasing brutal to keep control. Reportedly he kept body doubles and slept in a different place every night to ward off the assassination attempts.

Xi'an has many other interesting sights, such as an ancient city wall, the Wild Goose Pagoda, the Bell and Drum Towers, and the Hot Springs where Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped prior to the temporary unification of the Communists and Nationalists to fight the Japanese. We are actually going with a retired couple from Denmark who are also here at DMU. So the 4 foreigners are going to brave a Chinese city alone - stay tuned, this could get interesting!

We originally wanted to take the train to Xi'an. It would have been 7 hours overnight to Beijing, and then a day in Beijing followed by a 12 hour journey overnight to Xi'an. We were going to book the best possible class (known as Soft Sleepers) which has 4 bunks in an enclosed compartment. Alas (or perhaps for the best) because the holiday is so significantly travelled, all the train tickets were sold out and we were forced to look into airfare. The only web site in English you can book through is Elong. Usually the airfare in China is very cheap but being a peak travel time it wasn't as nice.

After consulting with our Danish friends, I went ahead and booked the flights as I would on any other web site (minus the Credit card...they call you to get that information, or so I thought). A few minutes later I got a call from a nice gentleman from Elong who spoke English. He confirmed the reservation but he also informed me that to use a credit card they charged a 2% fee and they couldn't issue the tickets and thus book the prices unless I mailed them a signed authorization. Given that the prices were going up daily, we couldn't afford that option. So I said we could pay cash. He indicated they could deliver the plane tickets that afternoon. I tried to give him the address but he didn't believe me so I had to have him call a Chinese friend who gave him directions to the Administration building of our university.

Now picture this - the total for all 4 roundtrip plane tickets was 7600 Yuan. The largest denomination of currency in China is the 100 Yuan note. 76 notes to carry around! I felt like Al Capone...Of course when we went to meet the driver I accidentally dropped all the money...haha

(Try to ignore my latest face experiment)

D - The world's greatest detective...

2006-09-13T07:59:00.000+08:00

a coke fiend??? Okay so this is only moderately related to China, but I found it so amusing I had to post. Last week C was accompanied by a Chinese friend to the local English bookstore which contains literary classics such as The Da Vinci Code. The selection is not the greatest as I understand it. However, the bookstore did have "The Complete Sherlock Holmes". C has always been a big Holmes fan so she picked it up. The book is entirely in English so it's as good as buying it back home (perhaps with the exception of the rubber book binding).

In a few bored moments, I've picked up the book and read some of the stories. My previous Holmes experiences were not good so I was surprised that I quite enjoyed the repartee between Holmes and his assistant Dr.Watson. So last night I decided to read one of the longer stories, which is called "The Sign of Four". Here are a few quotes from the opening chapter...

"Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantlepiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. He thrust the shar point home, pressed, the tiny piston, and sank back into the armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction."

or
Watson: "Which is it today? Cocaine or morphine?"
Holmes: "It is cocaine, a 7% solution. Would you care to try it?"

and later in the first chapter...
Watson: "Would you think it impertinent if I put your theories to a more severe test?"
Holmes: "On the contrary, it would prevent me from taking another dose of cocaine."

Now I haven't finished the story of course, so maybe Holmes beats his cocaine habit by solving a mystery in a rehab facility, but I was shocked! To the author's credit, Watson does lecture him about the ills of addiction but I did not realize Holmes had such a bad habit. No wonder he can get away with wearing that hat...

D - Our students

2006-09-12T09:18:00.000+08:00

Looking over the blog, I realized we've really only alluded to our job here, which is teaching English.

As our faithful readers know, we are teaching at Dalian Maritime University. What may not be obvious is that the school is more than just teaching sailors. There are English majors, Information Management majors, Electrical Engineers, and so on. In other words, at least for China, it's a standard multi-disciplinary university covering liberal arts and science. They do have a special program for maritime students however. The two majors for martime are Marine Engineering and Navigation. The Marine Engineers will apparently end up on ship supporting the chief engineers and working on huge diesel engines and so forth. Eventually they will work their way up to chief engineer. The Navigation students will hang out on the bridge of ships and use a telescope to navigate the seas. Er, only kidding, they do have GPS on Chinese ships. Some intrepid navigators may end up as ship captains.

Although it's somewhat easy to mock the career choice of maritime students because it's so foreign to us, they are really excited about it. Managing a ship for import/export companies and multinationals is a very important part of the global economy so I am glad these students exist. I hope they like us enough to keep them on commercial ships and not serving on future Chinese aircraft carriers!

Anyway, so how do C and I relate to these various majors? Well, most likely because we don't have a TESOL (teach english as a second language) certificate and no prior teaching experiences, we've been assigned to teach majors called Marine Engineering, Automation, and Mechanism. The class for all of them is called Oral English I. The Automation and Mechanism students are completing military training through week 6 so we haven't had them yet. It's unclear to me what these majors are but I suspect they are also shipboard. The 4 classes I do have (C's as well) are all Marine Engineers and they are ALL male. Yes, not a single girl in any of our classes. And yes, they all wear cute little white sailor outfits with lapels on the the shoulders.

The engineering students we have are okay. Their english ability varies widely from inability to say anything to students you can actually have a conversation with. The skill disparity of course makes it difficult to plan lessons.

Interesting observations about our Chinese students
1) Must harness the group mentality rather than working against it. I swear that if I asked a question and only one student in the class knew the answer that the other 29 students would have it written on their paper within 30 seconds. You cannot create the concept of individual work. You will tell them you will fail them, you will make sure they understand and agree that this is an individual assignment....and without fail they will all "collaborate". My response to this is to create group activities where each group has different materials or objectives...and although some better students end up doing more of the work, at least it's not a total wash.

2) Lack of maturity. The students we have in our engineering classes are Juniors. Now freshmen are often immature in the US as well but usually by Junior year there's a certain amount of maturity gained. My personal belief is that these students have everything chosen for them. Their parents, their teachers, the school administrators either directly make the choice or strongly influence every choice. They also lack life experience - buying train tickets, awareness of other cultures, managing your own life. In a lot of ways I feel more like I teach high schoolers than college students. Our student volunteers don't fall into this category - they are a lot more mature than the other students but even there I have a sense of this almost child-like earnestness rather than adulthood. You begin to understand where this comes from when you find out that they can't change their major. Whatever they pick going in is what they are required to do the rest of the time!

In a future entry I'll address the trials and tribulations of lesson planning.

C - in sickness and in health

2006-09-08T22:43:00.000+08:00

A few minutes ago, D headed out for an evening on the town with some of the other foreign teachers. I didn't share his desperate need to escape the apartment, though, because I recently caught a cold and have been feeling really lousy. I didn't expect D to stay home and watch his wife Sniffleupagus blow her nose into her shirt all night, but tonight is "a dark and stormy night" if there ever was one, and the wind is rattling our apartment door in a way that is, if not unsettling, certainly far from settling. This rattling door combined with my plugged-yet-somehow-dripping nose are pretty much guaranteeing my inability to sleep tonight, and if D were here, I would probably feel a little bit better/calmer/safer etc. But I will instead spend time with our little blog here and my quickly-dwindling box of Kleenex. (And no, that isn't an instance of a brand name being substituted for a generic one -- I really do have Kleenex® brand tissues!)

I slept so little last night that I asked D to cancel my 8:00 am and 10:00 am classes for me, since he was going to the be teaching one room down the hall at both of those times, but I finally managed to get myself up and teach every class scheduled today. The 8:00 class isn't my favorite group of students, but I got through it okay, and consoled myself with the fact that my 10:00 class is much, much better. I wasn't prepared for how much better they actually would end up being, though; they had written "Happy Teachers' Day!" on the board in perfect English, and on top of that, they gave me flowers and applauded for me.

Needless to say, all of that made me feel a great deal better! The 2:00 class went on forever, though, because a random graduate student decided that he will be auditing my class for the semester, and he talked with me for what felt like an eternity after class about Jack Welch, how I should teach bible stories (???), and maybe we could go out to dinner some time! Sigh. How I would love to have just ONE female student!

D - China: The good, the bad, and the ugly

2006-09-08T17:10:00.000+08:00

Well, C and I have had a good start to life in China. We are definitely adjusted and in the flow of our classes and our daily activities. We're both being tutored in Chinese by a student at DMU. In addition, I've ordered another economics correspondence class to continue to my college education I neglected while at RIT. I never took undergraduate econ, which I found out will hurt me when I apply to grad school for a MBA or MA someday. Between Chinese, economics, lesson planning, and our daily lives, time is filling up! But I thought I would take some time to summarize a few of our experiences with CHINA: THE GOOD, THE BAD, and THE UGLY.

CHINA

THE GOOD:

Cheap chinese food around the corner. It's not obvious from previously posted pictures but there are 3 medium sized apartment buildings directly south of the DMU campus. Ours is pink and the other two are a dirty white. In the downstairs of all three buildings, there are various shops and restaurants. At first I was a little reluctant to try the restaurants but now that we've developed a repetoire of dishes we like, it's becoming a joy. And the food is CHEAP. And good. The 西红柿炒鸡蛋 (scrambled eggs and tomatoes) are delicious. C and I can have a great meal with 3 different dishes for only 15 kuai (about $2). Even on our teacher's salary it would be manageable to eat out locally every day.

Learning Mandarin Chinese. Although learning Chinese is very difficult, it's actually a real joy when you can practice something like that and then go out and talk to real people. For example, our tutor taught us a dialogue for ordering a large bottle of water for our cooler (you can't drink from the tap here). I was definitely nervous but the next day I called and was able to order the water successfully. Yes, it was a little hairy here and there but she repeated my order back to me and lo and behold the water was delivered the next day as requested.

Watching a talented girl learn American speeches. Our Chinese tutor is also our student. In exchange for her help, we read her english compositions and give suggestions. We also help her with pronunciation. Just last week she was required to read Martin Luther King's "I HAVE A DREAM" speech. I wanted so much to try and explain the significance of the speech. I felt so proud to be American when she was reading it. I wanted to inspire her to change China as much as MLK changed the US

Note that I could list many more "GOOD" things here, but this will probably become a regular feature, so no doubt I'll share more positives in the future.

THE BAD:

Squat toilets. Yes, they are more sanitary, I'll grant you that. I have been forced to use them a few times so far and it's nice to know you're not sharing the same porcelain as Dirty Harry. However I've yet to master the gymnastics required to really get my money's worth. Probably not what you wanted to read about in this blog I'm sure, so I'll stop there! Oh, I should note that our apartment has a nice western toilet, so this is not a daily issue.

The English obsession.EVERYONE here wants to learn English, which is laudable. I wish Americans shared the same passion for the languages of others. Of course it's easier for them to want to learn English because you can use it to speak to Americans, Brits, Swedes, Africans - almost anyone. If you're a native english speaker, it's harder to choose but these days Chinese wouldn't be a bad idea. Anyway, so why is this bad you ask? Well, within the past few days we've been inundated with people trying to come to our classes, talk to us on the street, or knocking on our doors. Some of our Chinese friends keep trying to introduce more and more people. To a degree, this is flattering and I certainly hold no grudge against them for trying. I'm quite impressed with the quest for knowledge. It is hard for us to say no however because we don't want to be rude. Sometimes enough is enough!

THE UGLY:

Spitting. I think spitting is putting it very mildly. I saw people spit on the sidewalks in New York. I found it gross there as well. But I think China would win the gold medal. When the guys here spit, they reach deep within. It's the throat clearing to end all throat clearing. Even in our apartment, we can hear them outside. It's not a big deal, I'm being a bit childish for blogging purposes but it can certainly make one cringe!

C - non-standard standard speech

2006-09-04T16:33:00.000+08:00

D is sitting at the kitchen table right now, practicing his 普通话 using flash cards. He (ideally) recognizes the character and then practices saying the word a few times. When he says a word that uses the third tone, though, it sometimes sounds like he's burping. I'm trying not to laugh.

Learning Mandarin Chinese isn't easy, but it definitely could be a lot harder. Many of the sounds are easy for English speakers to make -- only a few are very hard to pronounce. The morphology and grammar are relatively simple compared to English. What makes learning this language hard is a) the fact that the written language consists of thousands of tiny, very abstract drawings, and b) the abundance of homonyms.

Regarding the abstractness of the characters, my Chinese character workbook tells me that this is a picture of a pig under a roof: 家

Oh, a pig! Of course! Now I see it. (In case you wondered, this character means "home." Home is where the pig is, as we all know.)

(Somewhat relatedly, D and I recently tried to teach one of our Chinese friends the meaning of the word "sarcasm.")

This is a picture of a bird flying:飞

And this is a picture of a sick person lying in bed: 疒

I never knew that a flying bird and a sick person lying in bed could look so similar. I do know, however, that if someone who died three thousand years ago invites me to play Pictionary with him, I should just say "no thanks."

And regarding the homonyms, there are 39 characters pronounced "yi" with the fourth tone. Their meanings are hardly similar; they range from friendship to epidemic disease to legendary archer. Needless to say, understanding spoken Chinese is sometimes difficult. We're still optimistic, though -- just don't ask our tutor about her level of optimism for us!

A trip to downtown Dalian

2006-09-04T12:53:00.000+08:00

Last Saturday (Sept 2), C and I decided to visit downtown Dalian. I had been there once for some bar hopping last week, and then we both saw it in a blur during our medical examination the following week. But we never really got to walk around and experience the heart of the city.

We took the 502 minibus, which costs 2 kuai (about 23 cents) from the nearest bus stop all the way downtown to Zhongshan Square, which is considered the heart of the city. After about only 2 or 3 stops we managed to get a seat, which is practically unheard. Given that the ride downtown is at least 30 minutes, you definitely want a seat! The Chinese buses and trams are insane in terms of the number of people getting on and off, but Saturday's bus trip was comparatively mild.

When we got to Zhongshan Square, I took a brief movie with our camera, which I will share below:

And here are some pictures of Zhongshan Square:

From the Square, we decided to go looking for a Chinese antique store we heard about that was supposed to be on Tianjin Jie (Jie=Street). We walked the length of Tianjin Jie and we never found the place (addresses in China are very difficult to track down when you're not a native). That was fine though because we saw so many different markets. There were people selling vases and woodwork and bubble tea and meat-on-a-stick and a thousand kinds of fish. On Tianjin Jie you could find the perfect bra or bargain for sea cucumber. The street markets have an energy that you don't feel shopping at your local department store. It was a neat experience to see all the wares. And of course everyone tried to get our attention by yelling "HELLO!!!!" at the top of their lungs.

Here's a picture of a long line of food vendors:

Something you don't see in China very often - an orderly queue:

We also saw a Starbucks during our meandering. I promise we didn't go in. I hear a cup of coffee is 30 kuai, which is ridiculous.

After wandering around for awhile, we decided to get some food. We had a Korean restaurant in mind on Qiyi Jie, but yet again we were thwarted. We wandered up and down Qiyi Jie but never found the place. Not to worry however, becuase on the bus on the way into the downtown area we saw two western restaurants that looked interesting. One is called the I-55 Coffee Shop and the other was the Bavarian Brew House. Believe it or not, we do eat Chinese food all the time during the week. I swear we don't eat Western cuisine all the time!

In the end we opted for the brewhouse. The allure of the Paulaner Weissbier was too good to pass up (apologies to my german relatives for not using the eszett in Weiss!). We both had some sausages, sauerkraut, and mashed potatoes. We were magically transported to the Fatherland by our English speaking Chinese waiters. The food was pretty good. I am not sure it compares to the real Bavaria but it was certainly a treat for our noodled out taste buds. C had some ice cream for dessert, while I opted for another wheat beer. From here we headed back to our humble abode via taxi. It was a good first experience downtown.

D - Coming soon, C will post...

2006-09-03T17:53:00.000+08:00

Well, I have monopolized this here blog long enough. Pretty soon C will step up to the plate and post entries to our humble blog. From the better half will come better entries! So if the entries seem different in style, they are probably from her!

Photos: Xinghai 2

2006-09-02T12:06:00.000+08:00

Photos: Rainy Xinghai Square

2006-09-02T12:01:00.000+08:00

Dalian on Google Earth

2006-08-31T10:23:00.000+08:00

A million other bloggers have posted that you can see Dalian in the latest BETA version of Google Earth. I thought you might be interested in seeing where we are and where some of the "landmarks" mentioned in the blog are.

First, you need to download Google Earth from here.

Then you install the program, and click on the links below when Google Earth is open on your computer. It will automatically take you to each one. By the way, I understand the irony of not using full names in my blog, and then providing the exact coordinates of where we live. What can I say, we're all full of contradictions :)

Our Apartment Building

DMU Main Building

Trustmart (local grocery store)

Xinghai Square

Zhongshan Square

Photos: Our Apartment, part 2

2006-08-30T19:26:00.000+08:00

Our Bedroom

The view to the north out our kitchen window. There's a faux ship mast in a courtyard full of trees

The view to the south and southwest out our bedroom window

Photos: Our Apartment, part 1

2006-08-30T19:03:00.000+08:00

Our building from the south (pretty in pink)

Our lovely front door!

The Living Room

The Kitchen (the light's a bit poor in this one)

Photos: Newark Airport

2006-08-30T18:56:00.000+08:00

Before Check-in

At the Gate

Our 777 to Beijing

Dogs - love them, don't eat them

2006-08-30T16:54:00.000+08:00

My dog Cody didn't want us to go to China. He parked himself next to our bags the night before we left!

First Night on the Town

2006-08-30T12:35:00.000+08:00

This entry almost got skipped due to my reluctance to go to our local internet cafe. You see, just about every male here smokes like a chimney, and you can smoke almost anywhere. I've been a few places where I was bowled over that the air was fresh and that they were actually enforcing the no smoking policy. Anyway, I hate going down there because you come back smelling like the Marlboro Man, and it burns my eyes.

However, we just got our DSL working! Back in the saddle at last. It's definitely slower than your garden variety DSL in the US but anything seems better than hanging out down in the cafe (perhaps "internet saloon" is more apt) downstairs. As a side note, another interesting fact about these local internet cafes is the preponderance of 20 year old boys (and I do mean boys) playing Counterstrike and Warcraft III from the wee hours of the morning to wee hours of the morning. It seems in China that male students are either: studying, chanting militaristic-sounding shouts in the courtyard, or making the world safe for democracy through the world of online gaming. I left out "frustrating their western English teachers" but that's a topic for another team.

Last Friday, an Irish fellow and I headed out to meet a few other teachers on the town in downtown Dalian. This fellow has a blog you can check out. He helped make C and I feel comfortable that DMU was a legitimate place that paid on time and wouldn't have us living in an anthill. So anyway, we took the number 23 bus after some dinner. In the evenings here in Dalian, as in New York City, the traffic dies down dramatically (perhaps "dies down" is insensitive given China's poor traffic safety record). So the bus was almost like taking a taxi. It flew along Dalian's wide boulevards and through Zhongshan Square (the heart of town). We got off downtown and meandered down the Renmin Lu ("The People's Street") towards the Shangri-La hotel. For those of with you means, the Shangri-La hotel chain appears to have an excellent 3-4 star hotel in almost every major Chinese city, should you wish to stay in style as you visit China. My Irish friend indicated that the pub we were headed to was on the street behind the Shangri-La.

As we walked down an alley (a BIG alley, not a shifty one), we saw China's winds of change. Old beat up Chinese cars parked next to the mainstay Volkswagens and Toyotas of the upper Chinese middle class, and finally the S-Class Mercedes - truly the transportation of choice for the elite. Once we turned right on the back street behind the hotel, we entered a new world. Apparently in China, expat bars are in the same class as massage parlors and sex shops. China has a funny faux society where the people are loath to express the most basic physical affection in public, but the risqué establishments are as seedy as they come. Of course, unlike an American city, you don't feel unsafe in the Chinese red light district. It's not dangerous, just "adult". A block or two down and we found our watering hole for the evening - an Irish pub called "The Tin Whistle". The other teachers were already there and they were easy to spot since they were the only people in the place other than the staff.

I had a Tsingtao and we shot the breeze for an hour or so. The other American teacher (a 24 year old from Colorado) had a Corona. The beer cost 10 kuai each (about $1.50) The Chinese waitress was exceptionally rude, which I have found to be unusual in China. Almost everyone here is really nice to foreigners so I was taken aback when she practically yelled at me the price of the beer. Sorry lady, I didn't hear you the first time!

Eventually we got tired of the rude waitress and decided to look for a livelier atmosphere. Apparently that's hard to find in Chinese nightlife. The average Chinese person saves about 30-40% of their income, so except for a few karaoke establishments, most places don't get too crowded except on special occasions. We walked back towards Zhongshan Square and settled on a place called Rio that had outdoor tables. Rio was an interesting place. First, there were actually people there. Secondly, half of them were Chinese, and the other half were Russian. My fellow English teachers cautioned me to lower my voice when I pulled my "mother Russia" routine and started talking like a Muscovite gangster. At Rio we had some type of light lager draft beer. It wasn't bad. I also got to experience the unisex bathroom. Chinese toilets of course are porcelain bowls in the ground. I found it a bit odd utilizing this queer WC (as it's called) knowing a Russian girl was in line behind me for my stall. One must adopt the common refrain I've heard from other Westerners - "It's China!" And say it with a smile!

Around 12:15 I had gotten enough of my first taste of Dalian nightlife and the other American teacher and I got a cab back to "Da Lian Hai Shi Da Xue" 大连海事大学 aka Dalian Maritime University. Ironically enough the Irishman and the Brit decided to stay out and keep drinking. "I'm Irish!" he said.

Xinghai Square and Pizza Hut

2006-08-27T09:57:00.000+08:00

Although Saturday was rainy here in Dalian, C and I decided we should actually see more than the southwestern corner of the city where DMU is. So around noon we headed out to Xinghai Square. Xinghai Square is one of the city's most famous sites. It's apparently one of the largest squares in Asia. And indeed it is huge. We took the 202 tram up about 5 stops and braved the road crossings to get to the square. The square is located in southern Dalian, directly on the Yellow Sea. The square is very beautiful and has many pillars and sculptures scattered throughout. There are also pools of water and marble everywhere. It's a very relaxing walk to take in. Once you get to the end of the square, there's an observation area right next to the sea.

Since it had just rained in Dalian, there were clouds everywhere in the sky but they all had the most interesting shapes. Dalian City has green hills and mountains poking up all over the peninsula, so the clouds draped the green mountains like cloaks. Above the square in the hills is what looks like a european style castle, probably Russian in origin. We have pictures of all of this of course, but we can't upload until we get our own DSL next week (hopefully Tuesday or Wednesday).

After enjoying the square thoroughly, I had a craving for some western food. I knew there was a Pizza Hut on the 23 bus line, but we weren't exactly sure where. C was reluctant at first to go on a Pizza Hut expedition without exact knowledge of how to get there. I convinced her I could find it and off we went. The Pizza Hut was a thing of beauty. Western restaurants tend to be much more upscale in China and Pizza Hut was no exception. Their menu was crazy though. You can get crab pizza there. Ew. Apparently Pizza Hut China was running a "New Orleans" promotion, where many foods were branded as being from Nawlins. For example you could get New Orleans chicken wings, and gumbo soup. But you could also get a cocktail called "The Hurricane"! Talk about insensitive...shame on Pizza Hut - one man's disaster is another man's marketing opportunity I guess.

Anyway, they did have the "American special" which was a pan pizza with pepperoni. And it was just like home.

Anecdotes

2006-08-25T14:04:00.000+08:00

A couple days ago, I took the Dalian tram from our university towards the downtown area. I found it to be far superior to the bus. It's larger so there are more seats, and it's actually air conditioned - which borders on miraculous in China. It's also quicker. And you're not subject to the whims of Chinese drivers. We've been in buses that have made some pretty crazy moves. It would be neat if more cities in the US had a light rail system. I know they are building one out in New Jersey near Jersey City (close to NYC), but it's definitely a very nice system. Smooth, clean, and efficient. Maybe $5/gal gas and we'll think about it...

C and I ate lunch at KFC today. KFC is hugely popular here. Apparently the Chinese love their fried chicken. All week we've been eating native, but after a few poor meals, I wanted a little bit of western food. The biggest problem we have is that unless a helper is with us, we can't read the menu. So we stumble through with our rudimentary Chinese and hope to get the message across. On Tuesday we ate dinner at a local place and ordered a chicken dish which the waitress said was their specialty. Well, their specialty consisted of a few vegetables and every part of the chicken you could think of, NOT including any breast meat. There were feet and ribs and God knows what else. There wasn't anything edible though! But even at the local restaurant that has an english menu, you can get surprises. At least there I was able to avoid ordering the fried pigs blood.

One of my students asked me today if "all americans are tall, handsome, and blue eyed like you".

Some other students asked me what I thought about Taiwan. I was briefly tempted to push for Taiwanese independence - kidding. I told them Taiwan and China should be come one, but only through peace. I think that placated them. The secret police can calm down.

The Human Spirit

2006-08-23T09:22:00.000+08:00

No matter where you go, it seems that most people are the same. We want to love, be loved, be with our families and give back to our world. In my second class with one of my engineering sections, I had them write a short essay describing their home town. They were to identify any historical significance of their town, talk about the natural beauty, and what they enjoyed about growing up there. Some of the essays were unremarkable – “my town is beautiful and I like it very much”. That’s a decent sentence for a non-native speaker but perfunctory. Here are some of the essays I got that I found more inspirational – or representative of the changes that China is undergoing.

“I am from Hebei province. My hometown is not very beautiful but I love it because the people are kind-hearted and they teach me how to face my future. I will study hard and build it more and more beautiful and rich. Welcome to my hometown.”

“I was born in a small village in Hebei province, the town is about 200 kilometers from Beijing. When I was a child, my good friends and I always go fishing and swimming in spare time, but now the loved river besides our village has been dry out. It is a unfortunate thing! There are lots of trees around our village, kinds of. The people there are very friendly and they most have never seen a foreigner.”

“My hometown is a small village of Henan province. There are lots of mountains and rivers around it. In my childhood, I usually climbed the mountains and swam in the rivers with my friends. Sometimes we went fishing too. However, great changes have taken place in the past four years. Now a highway comes through it and the people of our village live a happily lives and many of the children have the chances to go to university in my village.”

“My hometown is Tieling which is in the north of Liaoning. It is called the bigger city. I like my hometown very much. When I come back from school, I want to go home. My hometown is not beautiful and rich, but it is my root, is the place which I grow up. My heart belongs to there.”

Now if I were in Chinese class and trying to write an essay in my beginner Chinese about my hometown in Pennsylvania, I doubt I could have written such things. I could have said it was “hen mei” (Very beautiful) but that’s about it. I’m impressed with how these students are observing the changes observing in their lives. You can see that this is a hopeful time for them. And how could someone who worked with these students see them as enemies? China brings many challenges to the United States but what Americans must never forget is that thousands in China are being brought up out of poverty every day by the tremendous economic growth. We’re all people and we all want a decent life for ourselves, our families, and our communities. We must help Chinese understand that about Americans as Americans must understand that about Chinese.

Day 2

2006-08-21T13:04:00.000+08:00

Day 2 was pretty good overall. The day began with a tour of the DMU campus where we met all of the other new foreign teachers. There's several people from the US that are the same age as C and I, including a guy from Indiana and one from Colorado. There's also a retired Aussie, a retired Dane, and an early 30s guy from the UK. It's an interesting group. A few of us decided to get some lunch and the fellow from Colorado walked us to a Muslim noodle restaurant he had tried.

We had a number of additional errands to run including getting some allergy medication for C, getting a copy of our apartment key, picking up some bed foam, and buying a printer. Our student volunteers Sylvia and Molly took us on a long bus ride to a main shopping district in Dalian. We hit an electronics store named Gome, and I got to see the huge Carrefour. Carrefour was my first taste of real Chinese crowds. It was packed to the gills with people. Every aisle was a fight to get through. Despite this, I didn't find the tremendous rudeness and shoving that I've heard existed. It was no more rude than New York City. When there's a lot of people in a small space you are going to bump people, there's just no way of getting around that. And it can be very frustrating but there's not much you can do but accept it.

We took a taxi back to our apartment for 20 kuai ($2.50) because there was no way I was going to try and hold on to a printer in a packed Chinese box. From here our student volunteers took us out to a Chinese dumpling restaurant. It was very good...I even enjoyed the pork dumplings which is a rarity for me. We went to bed at 9pm....our sleep schedules are still totally crazy but at least we are getting some sleep now.

By the way, I am sure people are wondering where the pictures are. We are working on it - without DSL in our apartment yet it's difficult to upload them at the internet cafe. They will get up there eventually.

Our first day

2006-08-21T13:00:00.000+08:00

After waking up (can you do that when you didn’t sleep?), we talked for awhile and then showered in our shower curtain less bathroom. The bathroom is interesting – unlike in the US, there’s no separation between the shower stall/tub and the rest of the bathroom. Needless to say we had to be quite careful where we pointed the shower head. We might have flooded the whole apartment otherwise! After getting dressed, we headed down to the internet café in the first floor of our building. That’s where I posted the previous 3 entries describing the travel to Dalian. Thankfully our families had received our emails from the night before letting them know we were ok.

After our café visit, we decided to take a stroll in our general area to see what’s what. We didn’t go out for long before another student volunteer was coming to help us get acquainted with the area an accomplish some of our initial tasks. Our apartment building is just south of Dalian Maritime University on a little road. Just west is another apartment building. Our building and the other apartment building have a number of little shops and restaurants on the ground floor. There’s a water bottle supply place (no one drinks from the tap in China), a phone card store, and we haven’t figured out the others yet. To the southwest of our building about a quarter mile is the Dalian Maritime University West Campus, which is beautifully laid out. We ventured that far and then came back to meet Sylvia, the student volunteer.

Continuing a trend, Sylvia was very sweet to us and a huge help. We went through our list of todos and items we needed and she helped us plan out what we could get Saturday and what would need to wait until Sunday. Our first destination was the local police station, where foreigners are required to register within 30 days. It seemed to take some prodding from Sylvia to pull the officer on duty away from his TV, but he eventually filled out the required forms while smoking a cigarette. C was a little offended that he ashed his cigarette in her passport.

From the police station which was just across the road to the southeast of our building, we caught the number 10 bus to take us to a shopping area. Each bus ride costs 1 RMB no matter where your final stop is. I was impressed with the bus driver as the bus was a stick shift! I would hate to operate the clutch in their traffic. We stood in the bus and as I held on I noticed there were handles you could grab that had the McDonalds logo and the ubiquitous “I’m Lovin’ It” tagline. The bus also had a strange feature – live Chinese TV. No one seemed to be watching the TV behind the driver’s head but I guess it’s a plus if you have a long ride.

After four stops we got off at the first commercial district we've seen in Dalian. We noted there was a Popeye’s Chicken next to our destination, “Trust mart”. TrustMart seemed to be one stop shopping as they had everything from groceries to electronics. It was a large, well laid out store and we picked up some more bottled water, coke, ramen, silverware, chop sticks, garbage bags, and some hangers. By this time, my 1 hour of sleep in 36 hours had started to get to me. I got really woozy and felt like I was going to pass out. Because I wasn’t feeling well we had to abandon our plan to have a Sichuan Hot pot lunch with Sylvia. Instead we grabbed Popeye’s and headed back to our apartment on the bus. Yes, I know – my first eat out meal in China was an American fast food chain. What can you do…

To close out the day, we walked over to the DMU administration building at 2:30 to meet with Flora, our Foreign Affairs liaison from the School of Foreign Languages. She gave us our class schedule and helped answer a lot of our questions about how the process works with teaching.

Finally, we went back to our apartment and started doing some schoolwork. I was brainstorming for my first class morning and making up a week by week schedule. Around 4:45, both C and I just crashed. We went and laid down and didn’t wake up until 10pm. Then we went back to sleep and didn’t get up until 5am the following morning. Hopefully we are finally starting to overcome the jet lag.

A Grief Observed (Dalian Airport to our Apartment)

2006-08-19T08:10:00.000+08:00

Once we gathered our bags, we were met by two lovely students from Dalian Maritime University. I will call them S and E. S was a fourth year student studying marine engineering and E was a fourth year tourism management major. They were really sweet to us and their English was quite good. They corralled a couple of taxis (we needed 2 because the tiny Volkswagens used as taxis couldn’t hold our bags and 4 passengers) and we headed south to DMU. It was getting dark so it was hard to draw too many impressions but Dalian has very diverse architecture and a very interesting landscape. Our drive featured different types of buildings ranging from sparkling new to tiny and dingy. It seems to be a very sprawling city, but unlike American sprawl the “suburbs” of Dalian are filled with multi-story buildings. After about a 25 minute ride, we arrived at our apartment building, which is just south of DMU. It shouldn’t take us more than a couple of minutes to walk to any of our classes.

When we got to the building, S and E directed the taxis to drive up onto the brick walkway in the back. I don’t think this was intended to be a road, but the taxi drivers gladly obliged. Talk about door to door service. We haven’t seen it in the daylight yet but the building has three entrances. We are in door number 2. To be honest, the stairway up to our fourth floor apartment is dimly lit and a bit dingy, but the apartment itself is pretty nice. C and I probably have more personal space here than we did in our apartment in Jersey! S and E showed us how to use all the different appliances and answered a lot of our initial questions. Later, the Foreign Affairs Officer of DMU stopped in to say hello. They were very attentive to our concerns but being exhausted we forgot to ask if we could dial internationally from our phone.

When they left, I went to call my parents who I am sure were very eagerly awaiting our call to make sure that our pickup panned out. Unfortunately the phone card that I purchased (eCallChina), apparently does not work from our phone. It claims you can use a particular toll free number in any city in China. Well that may be but we started to panic because we couldn’t contact our families and let them know we got here safely. There’s an internet café in the downstairs of the building so we did make it down there and pay for a few minutes of time to send emails. But as of this writing we don’t even know if they were received so we hope we have not given our parents heart attacks.

After doing some unpacking, C and I eventually decided to go to bed. You would think that having been up more than 25 hours, it would have not been hard for us to fall asleep. Unfortunately it was quite the contrary. I have to say that of all the nights in my life, this was probably in the top 10 of worst sleeping nights ever. Both of us got hit badly with missing our families. We got to see them more in the last two weeks then probably in the preceding 6 months but that actually made it worse. We were just there with them, enjoying the family life. I miss being with my parents and my brother. They were so good to us before we left and it was so nice to get an extended visit rather than just a weekend blip. And we worry about our families. Generally everyone is in good health but our parents are getting older and we don’t want to lose them. All of these feelings came out last night as we felt powerless and unable to call anyone. We spent a lot of time sobbing and holding each other. Finally we tried to get to sleep but it was a pretty fruitless efforts. I think C got 3 or 4 hours and I probably got 1 hour.

When you’re in a new place and you don’t speak the language, don’t know how to dial a phone, or buy food, or do anything that is so simple back home, you panic. That combined with missing our families made it very hard. But here we are – we eventually made it through the night. And yes we’re exhausted and need sleep (which God willing we can get tonight with our body clocks adjusting). The daylight is bringing new possibilities. Instead of being sick with grief and worry, we’re making a list of things we need and we’re about go out and explore campus. Later, some more student volunteers are coming by to help us shop and get acclimated. Right now honestly it is a struggle, but rather than the torment of last night it’s turning into the growth experience we hope this trip will be. Who knows – perhaps we will never get past our homesickness and end up coming back early, but we are going to give it a go the next few days and see what happens.

Been in China 5 minutes and already got fleeced (Beijing Airport to Dalian Airport)

2006-08-19T08:09:00.000+08:00

After getting off in Beijing, we headed up the escalator and down various long hallways to China Border Control. There was one additional entry form to fill out and then we got in, er attempted to get in line. Apparently all the international flights had landed at once so the lines for “Foreigners” as the neon signs read were snaking around the room. This of course caused a mass stampede of various nationalities aiming to get into China first. Fortunately they opened a few additional “Foreigner” lines (each of which caused an Ellis Island style immigration to the new line) which limited the chaos and allowed C and I to operate with more polite queueing methodology. Getting through customs was easy, I think all they cared about was that you had a valid Visa and checked “No” on each “do you have anything to declare” box. My name was spelled wrong on my Chinese Visa so it was with no small amount of trepidation that I took my turn at the desk but he didn’t give it a second thought. STAMP.

After you clear the customs desk and pick up your checked baggage you have to drop off a baggage customs form. What’s strange is that there’s no real sign or line or roped off area directing you to this desk. If you try to go past the desk one of the Chinese women will politely ask you to drop off your form but they could eliminate a lot of confusion with a couple of signs and a rope line. Finally, you have to pass your checked bags through an x-ray machine before you finally escape all the customs procedures. I amused the X-ray attendant by trying to ask where Terminal 1 was (the location of our connecting domestic flight to Dalian). Well “terminal 1” apparently doesn’t mean anything in Chinese so I tried asking where “zhongguo nanfang” (China Southern – our domestic airline) was. This produced a laugh and no further information so C and I headed out to the jungle that is Beijing Capital Terminal 2. We knew that we needed to get to Terminal 1 but there was a major shortage of signs even mentioning Terminal 1.

Keep in mind as you read this next section that C and I were hauling around (without the assistance of a luggage cart) 4 bags total, each weighing about 50 lbs. Had we been traveling a bit lighter I have no doubt in my mind that we would have figured out where to go and would have successfully checked in by ourselves. Unfortunately this was not the case and we were both quite stressed carrying 100 lbs each. I was sweating like a pig and C was struggling to roll her big bag with the duffel on top. We picked an area that seemed to take us towards Terminal 1 and a uniformed man (probably in his 20s) stopped and asked what airline we were flying. I showed him our tickets and he told us to go to Terminal 1, which we knew. He realized we had no clue how to get there and he started leading the way. We were so stressed we followed him and he led us down a long corridor that connected the two terminals. Along the way he picked up a luggage cart which simplified the trip. He also spoke decent English. C indicated to me that he was going to expect a payment for his assistance so I dug out 20 RMB (about $2.50). He definitely deserved a good tip because he took us a long way and at that time we were in no condition to figure all this out ourselves. He even took us right to the China Southern ticket counter in Terminal 1 and helped negotiate our greater than 20kg bags onto the plane. We were afraid we would have to pay more so avoiding this was great news. Finally, he lead us directly to the security checkpoint. By this time I had pulled a 50 RMB note because I felt he deserved extra for all the trouble he went to. When I went to hand it to him he said “too small, try 200 RMB”. Now 200 RMB is almost $25, which is extremely steep even for the amount of help he gave us. I tried to resist a little but I was soaked in sweat, exhausted, and he was holding our passports. Reluctantly I gave him the 200 kuai and he went on his merry way. Yes, we got taken but this was not the time to practice our negotiating skills in the Chinese marketplace. To be honest, we may have even saved money as he talked the China Southern attendant out of charging us for our heavy bags. Nonetheless I felt like a complete idiot for not standing my ground. As C and I walked away (and I must warn my sensitive readers of an upcoming offcolor remark), I muttered “I’ll tell you what’s too small”. A moment of a weakness for a weary traveler – surely our readers will allow me that.

Getting through security was very easy and Terminal 1 was reminiscent of a small US airport a la Buffalo or Rochester. It was very clean and modern just like Terminal 2. We bought a bottle of water and hung out until our flight left for Dalian. It was a half hour late but overall not a problem. The announcements were in English as well as Mandarin so it was easy to navigate. To my surprise there were at least 5-10 other non-Chinese on our flight to Dalian. The flight itself was very quick, about 45 minutes. They served a brief snack that consisted of an imitation American hot dog. And we got to speak our first Chinese words to a Chinese person on the plane. The flight attendant actually said “ni hao” instead of “hello”. I must say, it’s a little annoying when everyone speaks English when your purpose for being in China is to learn Mandarin. The flight attendants wore snappy red Chinese dresses (the type where they button high along the neck) and the seats were dressed up in a bright blue fabric with a pattern that seemed to design to evoke a Chinese motif. I guess China Southern is going for that “river boat on the Yangtze” feel. It was a good flight though and our bags were ready for pick up on the conveyor within about 10 minutes. Overall a thumbs up for China Southern, Terminal 1, and clever English speaking entrepreneurs wearing fake uniforms.

Pennsylvania to Beijing Airport

2006-08-19T08:08:00.000+08:00

Well, it’s 5:23 AM on Saturday, August 19 in Dalian, PRC. This entry probably won’t go up for a bit due to our lack of internet access but I wanted to write before I forget the details. I am also splitting the entries up because otherwise this post would be enormous and no doubt encourage our loyal readers to seek greener blogging pastures.

We got up at 6 AM in Pennsylvania and enjoyed a delicious breakfast prepared by my mother – turkey bacon, cinnamon roll bites, and fruit. A very good way to start a day of international travel. It took about an hour and a half to get to Newark from Bucks County. There was a little stop and go traffic on US22 but not bad. My dad pulled up to Continental departures at the C terminal and we got out and said our goodbyes. It was terribly hard as it always is. The current plan is to be here for a year and I know that moment of hugs and last minute declarations of love and concern is burned in my head for the duration. There’s something about saying goodbye that heightens your memory and allows you to relive those last few seconds with loved ones (and thus experience the heartache all over again). I know it was hard for my family to see us go to China so it was very tough. C went through the same thing a few days earlier when she left her parents in Buffalo.

After the tears got jerked away during our farewells, we went inside and checked in with our bags. We checked four total and our two biggest ones just sneaked in under the 50 lb mark. Actually they topped 50 but the attendants let us check them without an extra fee anyhow. We made it through security in about 10 minutes – it was a cakewalk. Everything logistical went well on the trip. As a tribute to leaving our homeland we sought out a Starbucks (iced grande coffee for me and a soy chai latte for C), and then wolfed down some Dunkin Donuts. Chances are we will lose 20 lbs in China so we indulged a bit. The flight boarded around 11:25am EST and took off around 12:45pm EST. The night before when we checked in online we were able to snag seats in row 16 – which is the first economy class row. We had seats up against the bulkhead meaning we had a terrific amount of leg room compared to most of economy class.

The food in economy class was so-so. Our meal choices were sirloin steak and salmon for lunch, then for our pre-landing snack it was dim sum or an omelette. C and I both went for the steak and the dim sum. The actual meat wasn’t too bad but the accompanying salad was a bit brown around the edges and the dim sum was unremarkable. The biggest refreshment issue was the availability of liquids. The current security situation of course prevented us bringing a bottle of water on the plane and we were constantly harassing the attendants for more.

We didn’t sleep a wink of course – it doesn’t matter how much leg room I have if I can’t lay flat. To pass the time we monitored our flight status on the heads up display, watched Mission Impossible 3, enjoyed each other’s company and pretended to sleep. Oh and C went bonkers without her lip gloss available. That’s one of life’s little conceits for her so she was quite angry at TSA for outlawing it in carry-ons. Otherwise the flight was unremarkable and LONG. Once you’re flying over Siberia you’d think you’re almost to China – wrong – another 2500 miles! We did okay for the first 8 or 9 of 14 hours but the remaining 5 seemed interminable. It was also the 8 hour mark where C developed motion sickness and spent much of the remainder doubled over in her seat. She’s proud that she didn’t lose her lunch though!

The plane landed smoothly in Beijing around 1:45 PM China time. Maybe it’s in my head but the bigger planes (like our 777-200) seem to land effortlessly, while the smaller A320s and 737s feel like they will shake apart. We had filled out the 2 available customs forms on the plane, and grabbed our carry-ons and disembarked – we were in Beijing Capital Airport, but not to Dalian by any stretch as my next entry will describe!

The "undiscovered" country

2006-08-17T10:15:00.000+08:00

Well, this is the last post before we head off to China. The bags are packed, the power of attorney is signed, the health insurance is purchased, the cars are sold, and the farewells have begun. It's with no small sadness that we leave for China, but we go believing that a tremendous adventure is awaiting us. The way things have worked out the last few days I can only attribute it to Providence. We are truly blessed and fortunate that we can take this trip. I hope we can take these upcoming experiences and not just internalize them but use them to give back to the world. If you have resources, you must use them wisely and I believe that understanding China and its people and bridging a gap between our two societies is very much worthwhile. I hope that we can change the Chinese people we interact with, just as we allow ourselves and our view of the world to be changed by them. I know this entry is overly optimistic but I hope we will not allow this trip simply to be a vacation from the real world, but the opportunity for personal growth in our faith, marriage, and future careers.

To our friends and family in the US - we love you and will miss you tremendously. Thank you for your tremendous support of our adventure and may this be a wonderful year for all of you as well.

China flights on the cheap

2006-08-10T09:37:00.000+08:00

Being the cautious bloke that I am, I didn't want to book our flights until we got the paperwork from the university. I reasoned that if they went to the trouble to get us the necessary visa paperwork then they were probably serious. So once that came through, I went to book our flights.

Early on in my research I found out that Continental Airlines added a Newark-Beijing direct flight in 2005. Given that Newark is tremendously more convenient for us to get to than JFK, this was rather appealing. Unfortunately a trip to continental.com showed a One-Way ticket to be $1500 for one person. That was prohibitive and probably more than the school would reimburse us for. The other dilemma I had was finding an agent who was capable of booking the second leg of our flight from Beijing to Dalian on the same itinerary as the EWR-BJS trip.

After scouring various sources, I find this post on the ESL Cafe China section that has a lot of great flight resources. Basically the way the various sites on here can offer cut rate prices is the existence of "airline consolidators". Airline consolidators apparently buy bulk fares from the airlines and get a significant discount by doing so. Consolidator fares are harder to make changes to (it would cost $300) and impossible to cancel so they are not for the faint of heart but are good for our situation.

Using flychina.com, we were able to get a $634 per person for a one-way ticket from Newark to Beijing and Beijing to Dalian. Although I know we could have done even better, given that this was less than a month before the flight, I am pretty pleased. Flychina.com made me a bit nervous because you couldn't confirm everything online, you just submit your request and then they email a form that you print out and fax to them. All and all though it worked out very well - within an hour we had confirmed flights on Continental and China Southern.

Now if we can just survive the jet lag...

Getting a Chinese Visa

2006-08-09T10:07:00.000+08:00

This blog has been far too PC so far, so this entry will begin with an offcolor reference - getting a Chinese Visa feels a little bit like a Chinese fire drill! Actually, that's not true at all - I just thought it was an interesting Wikipedia entry. Although the Chinese consulate managed to spell my name wrong on the Visa, I was otherwise rather impressed by their efficiency, professionalism, and ability to win a staring contest. It was actually I who was running back and forth and getting little accomplished.

But I've gotten ahead of myself, let's backup...how does one go about getting a Chinese Work Visa (aka a "Z" visa)?

Step 1, like most visas is to find someone to sponsor you. In our case, this was the university that hired us. But just because you sign the contract doesn't mean you can run off to the nearest consulate. You need to have your papers. In the case of Liaoning province, where Dalian Maritime University is located, we needed two things - a local work permit from the provincial government, and a Foreign Expert Certificate from the central government in Beijing. Your Foreign Affairs Officer at the relevant institution is responsible for acquiring these things after you provide them with your passport information and proof of your credentials. Credentials in my case was a Software Engineering degree that allows me to teach English. Go Figure.

Step 2 involves biting your fingernails and anxiously wishing, waiting, hoping, and praying that the FAO actually follows through your request and that said request does not get lost in the mazes of Chinese bureaucracy. For us, we submitted our information to the FAO on June 20, 2006 and received a fax of our papers on July 20, 2006. All the while we were waiting to book our flights.

Step 3, you have to go to your nearest Chinese consulate IN PERSON - or pay a Visa agent to go on your behalf. Yes, for all your Idahoans out here this means you have to make your way to the Washington DC consulate. In my case I ran over to the New York Consulate which is on 42nd street and 12th avenue, right near the harbor. With my Visa applications filled out, our passports and papers from the FAO in hand I figured nothing could go wrong. And it was pretty painless overall. You take a number when you get in and go up to the deli, er visa counter when your number is displayed. My conversation with the sullen gentlemen behind window number 4 seemed to consist of grunts but he seemed to understand I wanted a work visa. He was rather upset I had faxed copies rather than originals, but relented when I made a copy of my work permit for 25 cents. That afternoon around 2PM, I returned (yes I splurged for same day service!) and picked up our passports. All was well...

Or so I thought!
It turns out that they spelled my name wrong in my Visa. They typed a M as a H. I was horrified given that I invested half my day riding the M42 bus from Lexington Ave to 12th Ave and enduring the silent rage of disgruntled bureaucrats. So I returned a few days later to get it fixed. The helpful but not particularly glib gentleman behind the information window informed that "it no matter". A few google searches also confirmed that Chinese customs officers don't actually care about the Western characters on the Visa - imagine that! Well whatever - it could say Jackie Chan for all I care, we just need to get into the country.

And that is my visa adventure.
Word to the wary - although the procedure for me required a certain set of papers and procedures you cannot count on it being the same. Different provinces have different rules and it changes regularly. Your mileage may vary!

CHINESE CONSULATE INFORMATION

The International Health Insurance Dilemma

2006-07-10T06:24:00.000+08:00

Going to China is a very exciting venture and 9/10 of the planning is pure pleasure. Should we go to Tibet or Shanghai during our holidays? How do I figure out the bus route map? How do I pronounce Carrefour? (a French grocery store with a presence in Dalian). The remaining 1/10 consists of what-if scenarios - what happens when I break my leg in Dalian? Do I want Chinese doctors working on me? Will they be able to speak English? Who is going to pay for it? What if I have an accident in the countryside far from any decent hospital? Yes, if you're going overseas it is important buy good international health insurance - if you can find some that won't break the bank.

During my investigation of overseas medical, I've found that the international medical plans that are available fall into 3 general categories.

1) Short term travel insurance that includes medical coverage
2) Full international medical with overseas (non-US/Canada) coverage only
3) Full international medical including US/Canada

You typically can't get 1) if you're going an extended trip (greater than 6 months). The payouts as well are limited (max of $1,000,000 medical on the most generous plans with $50,000-100,000 being more typical). These plans seem to be more geared towards short-term travellers who have full health coverage in their home country and want a little extra comfort that they are covered. For example, a US health plan is not going to pay for emergency medical evacuation from China to the US for critical surgery. Travel insurance will cover this however, typically up to $100,000. The plan premium in this category ranges of course but tends to be $300-800 for a year. Nonethless 1) is not for us given the year-long nature of our trip.

For 2), you can get some pretty good coverage and the companies claim they have put together an international provider network to find doctors that speak English and meet certain minimum criteria. The best example of this plan is the Global Citizen EXP plan offered by HTH Worldwide. This plan is underwritten by Unicare, which seems to be the only US based insurance company that offers these types of plans. Aetna has their Global Benefits plan but they only offer it as a group rates to corporations. All the other companies out there appear to be offshore. The biggest one seems to be Multi-National Underwriters. Their plans don't seem too bad and the premiums are actually reasonable (around $1800 for my wife and I with a $2500 deductible). The problem is that they aren't regulated by any US body. So while their underwriter, Lloyd's is a reputable global insurance market, it makes me a little too nervous to get a MNUI plan given I can't even sue (they are an insurance broker, not provider in the US so they can't be sued). Of course the issue with 2) is that it's only overseas. So all the treatment would have to be in China. This makes the plan significantly cheaper but I am not getting the warmest of fuzzies from being stuck in a Chinese hospital and unable to go home because I have no insurance there.

So we fit into category 3). We need a plan that covers us in the US and abroad. Unfortunately, the Global Citizen plan which has the best looking cover from HTH Worldwide/Unicare is prohibitively expensive. For $3500, my wife and I can get 12 months of coverage with a $2500 deductible overseas and a $5000 deductible back home. We may have to bite the bullet but that's a lot of dough. Fortunately our school will provide up to 10,000 RMB in medical assistance while in China. That's not going to pay for chemo, but it should be sufficient for bumps and bruises.

Summary of companies providing various forms of international coverage:
HTH Worldwide / UniCare
Specialty Risk International
Multinational Underwriters / Lloyd's
International Medical Group / Sirius
TravelGuard International / AIG

Dalian

2006-07-04T11:33:00.000+08:00

In my first post, I shared that C and I will be teaching English in Dalian, Liaoning Province, PRC. So where is Dalian? And why are we going there?

Dalian is located on a peninsula that juts into the Yellow Sea between the Korean peninsula and mainland China. It is China's northernmost ice-free port, which makes it a very strategic location. Of course, this is also why Japan invaded China through Dalian in the past, and why post World War 2 the Russians also held onto Dalian until the 1950s. Although tragic, these occupations give Dalian an interesting mix of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian architecture. In today's world Dalian is still a crossroads of these nations - but this time in terms of business and trade rather than conquest. In addition, Dalian is a huge import/export terminal for oil in China. And of course being a port city, it's not complete without a maritime university, which of course is where C and I will be teaching.

Dalian's place in the world can be seen here courtesy of Wikipedia:

Dalian is also known for its fashion festivals and as a regional hub for foreign banks. It's also becoming known as a major provider of software services in Southeast Asia as many different tech companies setup shop there. Probably having the Dalian University of Technology (one of the most presitigious schools in China) and the Neusoft Institute does not hurt in this regard.

To learn even more about Dalian, check out the Runsky news site. It reads like a Communist Party advertisement for Dalian but there's definitely some good information to be had.

So why Dalian? Let's review our criteria for a city in China.

1) The city must be in North/Northeast China so that the Mandarin Chinese spoken there has less of an accent. In case you weren't aware, there are many different dialects of Chinese in use in China. The Communist party has designated putonghua, or Mandarin as the official language which is taught in schools and used in government and business. Gao Shu and I wish we could learn it all but since we need to stick to one language, so Mandarin seems like the sensible choice. Point 1 rules out Shanghai and other southern cities.

2) The city must not be heavily polluted. The sad reality is that China has a very poor environmental record and many cities in China are covered in smog daily. Although we will travel through polluted areas, we preferred not to live in one. Dalian is blessed with strong ocean winds that carry the pollution away from the city. In addition it is the site of less heavy industry than some other cities in the Northeast (such as Beijing and Shenyang).

3) The city must be of a reasonable size (relative to China) and have a reasonable number of services available. Since we're so new to this China thing, just being anywhere in China is going to be challenge enough. To help us with the transition we wanted to live somewhere we can buy what we need (as we can't bring it all) and maybe see another Westerner or two once in a blue moon. Good thing they've got Walmart!

4) The city must not be unbearably cold. This rules out cities in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces - aka Chinese Siberia.

The only downside to Dalian I've read about so far is that it is missing some of the other ancient charms of China (e.g. the Great Wall, the Forbidden City). To me this is minor however as we primarily want to experience the people, the culture, and the language. Travel to tourist destinations will be easy enough during time off.

The beginning

2006-06-26T09:46:00.000+08:00

Like the rest of the modern world, I have considered on many occasions writing a blog. Unfortunately, my 9-5 job never seemed to justify the existence of such a project. Nor have I had a strong inclination to write. In the working world, you get home, you're tired and it can be tough just to make dinner if you let yourself slip into that mode. An investment bank (where I've worked the past 2 years) does not lend itself to explosions of literary creativity.

But something interesting happened along the way to a plump 401k, a rich attorney wife, and a cushy VP job in a well respected corporation. Something that's actually worth writing about. You see, my wife C (LSAT genius that she is) was on her way to Duke Law School this fall. I, ever the "dutiful" husband was going to follow her down there and continue consulting at my current investment bank position for a rather generous hourly rate. Of course, it was actually me that was pushing to move south. My family hails from the south and I have been itching to get back. Something about experiencing my heritage. So I was pushing her to go to Duke, to give us an excuse to live there a for years - principally for the barbeque, partially for the southern accents, and finally for her to get a good education.

To be perfectly honest, it wasn't right. After we made the decision to go, every day seemed to make it more clear this wasn't what we should do. Oh, she was going to go through with it but it wasn't what she wanted. I kept assuring myself that she would come around and see what a tremendous opportunity it was to munch on pulled pork while camping out in Krzyzewskiville and studying Civil Procedure. Surprisingly, I was the one who pulled the plug. In addition to our general struggles on figuring out what law school C should go to, I have struggled with the wanderlust that seems to mark reasonably well off 20-somethings who are lucky enough to afford the notion. Although potentially lucrative, my position doesn't hold much for the soul. My coworkers are great and I work reasonable hours but I feel like I've become an adult too quickly. Combine that with a lack of obligations other than a stupid car lease - no kids, no mortgage, no sick parents and there is nothing stopping us from getting up and...moving...to...China.

C has wanted to teach English in China for several years now. I flat out said no. The idea of living, let alone working China was anathema to me. But love has a way of changing your mind. As does faith. One day, about a month ago, I came home from work after a particularly disenchanting day and I said "Let's go to China". I've seen how I will be spending the rest of my life. Doing work I don't love to pay off things I don't need and having a comfortable life to show for it. Well, I can't deny I want to be comfortable when I'm 65 but taking one year off isn't going to ruin my career. It was C's dream she thought would never be realized due to my stubborness and my conviction that dedicating every year of our lives to our careers was the right thing to do. But when you love someone and accept them and care about their deepest desires, it has a way of changing your heart radically. I can't explain how I went from sneering at her dream, to embracing it and making it my own, but it happened and I am grateful.

Life is full of energy again. I feel invigorated to get up everyday knowing the experiences we have ahead of us. To face this challenge with C at my side is wonderful.

And so on August 17, 2006, we will be flying to Dalian, Liaoning Province, People's Republic of China to begin a one year contract as oral english teachers at Dalian Maritime University. This blog will detail our experiences there. It will also feature opinions and thoughts on various topics that come up throughout the process.