D - The world's greatest detective...

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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!