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Switching blogs

Hello! Sorry for the silence for so long. I've temporarily switched blogs until I figure out a VPN situation.

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Head there for newer posts!

The view from Century Park

Xi Tang-a-rama!

From what I can tell, Xi Tang is famous for 1) Being a water town and 2) Tom Cruise filming part of Mission Impossible III there.

I am 1) All full up on water towns and 2) have never seen Mission Impossible III (or I or II). So here are some photos from the trip!

(We also visited a temple where we gave them money so they would pray for us to have more money. Counterproductive? )

 

To see more photos, click the link:

Slow boat to Shengsi

A few friends of mine decided to make a trip to Shengsi Island and I decided last minute to go along, too. I’ve been in Shanghai for almost four months and had only left the city for a work outing in a water town, so I really wanted to go on an overnight trip.

We didn’t have any solid plans, just to meet at the metro station we live near and head to a bus station where we bought tickets for our two hour bus ride to a port and one hour ferry ride to the island (RMB 109 one-way).

Click the link below to read more and see more photos from the trip! (It's image heavy, so I put it behind a cut)

Busy in the city

It's been awhile since I've posted, but really it's because I've been busy with work and hanging around and outside the city.

I recently made my first and second trips outside Shanghai! 

Trip #1 (barely)  outside the city: Xi Tang, apparently famous for canals and Tom Cruise filming Mission Impossible III there (we think the latter attracts the real tourists).

Trip #2 Shengsi Island, a two hour bus ride and one hour ferry ride from Shanghai.

I'll make proper posts about those trips soon!

Failing Chinese in China

I’m about a month into Chinese lessons and I’m doing poorly. So bad, in fact, that the other day in class when I finally answered a question correctly, classmates in the back row clapped for me. My teacher’s a tough lady and she either will not stop asking me questions out of spite (I lean towards spite) or because she’s baffled that I come to class nearly every day and I still can’t properly form a sentence.

One day – a Tuesday – at the beginning of class she asked me a question. I knew she was asking something about what day it was, so I attempted to answer what the date was until I realized she wanted a day of the week and even then I still kind of was just saying whatever words came to mind: Two, hour, American – they just kept coming out of my mouth, they had nothing to do with the answer, and she wouldn’t let it stop until I was not even saying words anymore, just making noises to fill the silence.

Then she looked at me and said, “You still don’t know how to say Tuesday?”

Another time she was drilling us on vocab words and classmates around me were rattling off dozens of fruits, vegetables and items of clothing. When she asked me to name as many colors as I could I could only remember green and red.

“What about blue?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about yellow.”

“I can’t remember.”

“What about white.”

“I’m not sure.”

And it went on like that until she’d exhausted the entire list of colors we’d learned and confirmed that, in fact, I really did only know green and red.

The tones are particularly hard for me. I’m a victim of phonetic s and still don’t understand why close pronunciation doesn’t count in Mandarin. Someone told me that there’s a very small window of time when you start learning Chinese to get your tones correct before you’re set in your ways, and I think that window is about to close for me.

I’ve even started regressing to remedial French: Instead of saying ‘Zhe’ in class one day, I pointed to myself (totally out of context) and said ‘Je!’ (Again, I think it was a situation where I didn’t really know the answer and words were just coming out of my mouth).

I only have a few more months of “survival” Chinese and then “beginner” Chinese starts (with the added bonus of starting to learn Chinese characters!) We’re not being graded, but if we were I think it’s safe to say I’d have to repeat the course.

I’ve been told not to feel too badly about this by expats and locals alike, as I’ve never studied the language before and I’m still fairly new to the country. I’m also pretty lazy at studying. And when I say pretty lazy, I mean I don’t study at all.

Laowai photo op

They're a Taiwanese girl group! No, they're not. 

Yesterday was Tomb Sweeping Day in China and while we were supposed to go to Hangzhou, there was a massive planning failure on our part. Who knew that on a national holiday where every other person in Shanghai is trying to leave the city you’d actually have to book a hostel and make train reservations in advance?

Instead, we spent a good chunk of our day in Qibao sitting and having our photos taken with tourists.

This never really happens to me in Shanghai probably because there’s such a large population of expats living in the city. But I didn’t really expect it to happen in Qibao just because it’s so close to Shanghai (or is still in Shanghai, I’m not sure). Although, it was probably our fault. It didn’t really help matters that we were sitting in the middle of a giant tourist attraction.

There were the ones who stealthily took photos like the guy with the giant telephoto lens who took National Geographic-style pictures of us from a distance and there were creepers like the man who took photos of our knees (actually, he was the only creeper).

Mostly, they were teens or college kids including a giant group of 13 or 14 teenagers who ran over to us asking for photos. The boys hung back, but the girls climbed up next to us either doing a peace sign or a thumbs up. They were apparently from Taiwan (in my mind, they were a Taiwanese pop group).

All in all, the whole experience was probably way more entertaining than Hangzhou.

It was either the peace sign or the thumbs up

Fool me once. Or twice. OK! Fool me all the time!

Never once has a person in the street shouting at me “Excuse me, hello, you speak English?” ended well for me.

There was of course, the incident in my first month here where I was waiting on a busy street for a friend and a man came out of nowhere shouting at me “GOOD AFTERNOON GOOD AFTERNOON!” And it threw me off my game because, really, who says good afternoon? And by the time I realized that I’d responded to him, he’d made his way across the street and was shaking my hand, telling me things like “I am Mickey Mouse, you are Cinderella. I’m here visiting my sister.”

Then it turned into a debacle in the middle of the street when he grabbed me really firmly by the shoulders and started to do the European kissing on both cheeks thing and I kept shouting “We don’t do that in America! We don’t do that in America!”

He didn’t actually get to my wallet, and this is mostly because it was at the bottom of my bag underneath a scarf, cardigan and a newspaper. I stumbled into a store to get away from him and watched him sprint off to, well, wherever it is he came from.

But, I thought, never again will I respond to people who speak English to me on the street. So, I ignored the women in People’s Square who greeted me with “Welcome to Shanghai! Welcome to China!” There was a woman who went down the line of people waiting for the metro who kept asking for the time – no time for her! Get a watch, lady! There was a really strange incident when I was walking home late after work and passed a van and two men in track suits got out after me yelling “Hello! Hello!” Definitely ignored them. And walked really, really fast. Then I thought of Run DMC and the nephew on the Sopranos that was also fond of track suits.

Things were going well, until tonight when I was waiting outside a metro stop for a friend. A man in a suit came out of nowhere and said, “Excuse me, hello, you speak English? May I bother you?”

See, this is his story: He’s from Beijing. Likes America! Hates to ask, but there was a problem with his washing machine, and he lost all his money. (Right, I don’t know how we got from point A to point B, either)

The sad thing is, if I were a better student, I would have been able to take care of the situation because last week we actually learned how to say “I don’t have any money.” But like 80 percent of the other Chinese things I learned it escaped my leaky sieve of a brain about 2 seconds after class ended.

The man eventually left (maybe it should have been me that left, but, I mean, I’m always the one who leaves when a stranger is trying to beg money off me. Why can’t they be the ones who leave first?). I watched him as he walked to the intersection and looked around, confused to the point that I though well, maybe there was some sort of terrible washing machine tragedy and all his money was….somehow…washed, I don’t know, away?

It could happen, right?

Have I talked about how hard the beds are in China? 

Of all the things I read about or people told me about before I came to China, no one told me about the hard mattresses.

When I got to Shanghai, I had flown for about 16 hours straight with little sleep on the plane. At that point – from traveling to the airport in Detroit and checking into the hotel in Shanghai – I had been awake for well over 24 hours and I was really ready to sleep.

But, when I sat down on the hotel bed it was like sitting on a concrete slab. I actually got up to look at the bed to make sure I hadn't sat on something (like a piece of plywood). After I went to bed, I kept waking up to roll over because whatever side of my body I was sleeping on kept going numb.

My apartment also came furnished with a rock-hard mattress. Some people splurge on their own soft mattresses from IKEA or pick up heavy feather beds, but the hard mattress doesn’t bother me enough to make the trouble of dragging a feather bed home on the metro seem worth it. (This is how lazy I am.)

I’ve heard it’s just because Chinese (and maybe other parts of Asia, I haven’t been anywhere but China in Asia, so, listen, I'm not really the authority on Asian mattress customs) think that hard mattresses are better for your health. 

Just for the record, my health has been the same. (So, for those of you who like to look at the glass as half full, the hard mattress hasn’t done any damage! For those that like the glass half empty, I haven’t found my health to be better in exchange for an uncomfortable night’s sleep.)

I feel like posting a photo of my mattress is insufficient and let's just frankly say not something I want you to see -- so I'll just post one of the alleys in the villa compound where I live. I also wish I had a scooter!  

I work in a mall

The view from work.

During the first few days I arrived in Shanghai, I already started getting the hint that, among westerners here, those of us who teach English (especially at the private language schools) are at the bottom of the expat food chain.

When asked what I do by various expat architects, bankers, engineers and art dealers I’ve gotten the eye roll and the “Of course” when I tell them I teach English. (As in: Eye roll, “Of course you teach English, everyone teaches English.”)

“I teach English” is apparently code for “I have a liberal arts degree and I wanted to live abroad.” 

And maybe some people don’t like that. But me – I have a liberal arts degree. And I wanted to live abroad. It’s sort of supply and demand. I can give the kind of instruction they’re looking for, and in return, they gave me the opportunity to live in China. I can’t help you with your banking investments. 

I don’t want to start an “import/export” business. I traded on the marketable talents I had.

I went to see a musician last week and he opened with a song about a guy who comes to Shanghai with a desire to soak up the culture, but things seemingly fall apart. In the song, he fails to learn Chinese and ends up “teaching English in a mall” before he packs up and moves back to America.

I teach English in a mall.

It’s true.

A good chunk of the private language schools are housed in malls. In fact, on the floor I work on there are at least two other private language schools.

So, I teach English. In a mall. It’s a job. But even in the short time I’ve been here, it’s a job that’s given me the opportunity to be somewhere I never actually thought I’d be.

Plus, look at the view from the teacher’s office at my school! 

As an added bonus, my school is just around the corner from this doner kebab place where I get these little pieces of heaven for 6 yuan -- which is less than a buck in USD!