Switching blogs

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

heygervais.wordpress.com

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