Week 8: H

HAIR salons: Hair salons are everywhere. On our little street alone, there must be five or six of them. Each one advertises with bright, neon columns. Given my great ability to communicate in Chinese, I might be growing my hair out for the next four months rather than try to explain how I want my hair cut.

HORSES and female mounted police: I went to Xinghai Square twice to try to get a picture of Dalian's famous female mounted police officers, but they weren't around. These women have to pass a beauty requirement to be assigned to mounted patrol, and tourists from all around take pictures of them. I'll keep trying to catch them in the square....

HALLOWEEN: Well, I forced myself to go to Pizza Hut to see what their little Halloween give-away was all about. Yeah, that and to eat a personal pan pizza.

Halloween came a little early in my class today as we played the mummy-wrap game. (Notice the great uniforms on the kids. Wouldn't it have been great to have gone to school in these comfy clothes? The black uniforms are for a private bi-lingual school, but the blue uniform is what you see almost every child in Dalian wearing on the streets.)

Chinese: Technology to the rescue!

Well, my Chinese hasn't improved at all, but I'm finding new ways to communicate.

Cameras: Last month was National Teacher's Day (what a great country!) and the school kindly gave all the teachers shampoo and conditioner sets. The problem, of course, is that I didn't know which was the shampoo and which the conditioner. So, I had to bring this picture into school and have one of the Chinese teachers read the bottles for me.


Texting: Last Saturday morning around 7:00 my roommate and I received text messages. It was our manager with the following message "Hi, teachers. Today is colder than yesterday. Dress a warm jacket, maybe better." How sweet is that? In the future I'll have to make sure that my supervisors have my cell number so that I can get clothing advice.


Cell phones: Last night--Dad, don't read this--I was in a car with a stranger. I had just had a private lesson with him, and the school asked him if he could take me home. The problem, we have discovered over the past few weeks, is that there are two parts of town that sound like my street. They've told us that we have to tell taxi drivers Taoshan and not Taoshan. (Yes, that is the same exact word, so it makes things a little confusing.) Anyway, he started going to the other Taoshan and so I had to call a Chinese teacher and she had to tell him where to go. Amazingly, she wasn't concerned when I called her and said, "Lily, I need you to tell this man where I live." When he got me home, he said, "I'm so reviled." I'm pretty sure he meant relieved!


Sometimes, you don't need technology. We've decided to only eat in restaurants with picture menus. Or, the other night, I tried another strategy. I walked up to a table where a man was eating a great-looking noodle soup and I said, "one!" Very "me...Tarzan, you...Jane" but it worked! And... you know what else? if you get up and start to leave a restaurant without paying you don't even need to learn how to say, "Please bring me the check." They will automatically take care of you!

Week 7: G

GAP-toothed GRINS: How great are these smiles? No, I didn't give them their names, but the boy on the far left is called Tony and the boy next to him in blue goes by Romeo. Ol' Tony gets winded every time we play a rousing game of duck, duck, goose (or, as we play it: my mom, my mom, your dad). I have approximately 150 students, but I think this class is my favorite. The kids are about 7 years old and haven't learned to be self-conscious yet. (Melissa, do you think the boy on the right is wearing licensed Snoopy gear?)

GIRLS in pink. Just a generation ago the Chinese were wearing uniforms issued by the State, and now they look like they could be at home in any American mall. Isn't it odd how they have embraced the gender attributes of colors? It would be fascinating to see where they got the notion that pink is a girl's color. Can we blame this on Barbie, too?

I didn't know what to do in my level-9 class last Sunday, so I had them act out the new vocabulary. This was: "You shouldn't have climbed the ladder, you could have been electrocuted." Uh...did you know how to say that sentence in a foreign language when you were in middle school? I guess the kids really do learn a lot going to school from 7:30 in the morning until 6:40 at night. They attend school 240 days a years (180 in the US). Last week, they were off for a whole week for the Nation's Day Holiday...but the schools required them to come in on a Saturday and Sunday for make-up days. Hey, nephews, no more complaining about school!

Week 6: F

City of FOUNTAINS? Rome, Kansas City and Dalian? This fountain in Renmin Square looks like it would be at home on the Plaza.

FOOD: Watching Jim and Pam get married on "The Office" on Hulu and listening to "This American Life" on my iPod, it is sometimes difficult to believe that I am in China....that is, until I walk into the supermarket. A young woman I met here told me that her grandparents spent some time in the US and hated it because there was so little variety in the food available. After wandering the aisles of the supermarket here, I can understand what they are talking about! I only recognize about 30% of the food on sale. Since I can't understand what any of the packaging says, I usually walk around aimlessly and end up leaving the store with some nuts and vegetables. My latest strategy is to follow old men around and pick up what they get. I'm working under the assumption that they are widowers and don't know how to cook.

Last week we went to a supermarket that features a lot of food for Westerners (in fact, we met a French couple standing in front of the butter!). The good news (and the bad news) is that a lot of their packaging was written in English, so I could finally figure out what some of the food was. A sampling:
--tiger skin chicken feet
--albacore fish candy
--pickled pickles
--an entire row dedicated to packaged seaweed
--an entire row labeled "MSG"
--pig lungs
--turtle meat (actually, you can buy live turtles and pigeons in the market near my school)
--meat floss. Meat floss is everywhere. What is meat floss? According to Wikipedia: Rousong is made by stewing cheap cuts of pork in a sweetened soy sauce mixture until individual muscle fibres can be easily teased apart with a fork. This usually happens when the collagen and elastin that normally hold the fibres have been cooked out of the meat. The teased-apart meat is then strained and dried in the oven. After a light drying, the meat is mashed and beaten while being dry cooked in a large wok until it is completely dry. Rousong is used as a topping for many foods. It is also used as filling for various buns and pastries, and as a snack food on its own.

FRUIT: I wasn't expecting all the gorgeous fruit stands around the city. This one is at my bus stop. I especially like the ladies with their persimmon stands.


FISH: [No, Lisa, no pictures of the squid-on-a-stick they sell in most markets.] I went to the aquarium on Saturday. It is the only one in China with a tunnel, so you can walk "under" the water and watch the turtles and sharks swim over you. There was also a UFO (with a TV showing a soccer game from 1994??) and a mermaid. Heavy on entertainment, light on education.

Week 5: E (continued)

EXPECTORATE: (v) to discharge matter from the throat or lungs by hawking, coughing or spitting. Used in a sentence:
--It is a common custom to expectorate in China.
--Do you understand how crazy it is to blame a few Americans living here for the rapid spread of the H1N1 virus when everyone expectorates in China?
--The new alarm clock: everyone expectorating outside my window.
--Disgusting! Was that a young woman expectorating?
--When you hear someone beginning to expectorate, walk faster; you never know where the "discharged matter" will land.

Hi! I just had to "spit out" a quick post. Happy Saturday.

Week 5: E

EYELIDS: On the first day of classes, three of my four-year-old students came up to me and started poking me in the eye. I, naturally, was a little alarmed at this behavior and asked the Chinese teacher in the classroom what was going on. She told me that I was probably the first Westerner they had ever seen, and that they were fascinated with my eyelids. Ah! This explains the ads in the taxicabs for plastic surgery to give you the appearance of having eyelids. And some of the guys here tell me that a successful pick-up line is, "You have such big eyes."

ENGLISH: Either I am forgetting my English or the translators here have created a new language called "Chenglish." Some examples:

--On my comforter cover: Happy day is time

--On a brochure for beach-side apartments: sunny smell, comfortable safety, and concretionary music

--Tasty meal square (This, I discovered, is a food court.)

--At the zoo: Don't stride over the fence.

--At the bus stop: Keep your manner and travelling safely

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see English anywhere (in fact, I'm just happy to see romanized letters), but I'm just not sure if this is English.

ELEPHANT: We had our pictures taken with the performing elephants at the zoo. This is my colleague holding on as the elephant rises on his hind legs. My picture might appear under "T" for terrorized or "U" for uncomfortable.

Week 4: D

DALIAN: Lying at the tip of the peninsula in the Yellow Sea, Dalian is a city of 6 million people. To find it on a map, you go to North Korea and then head straight west. Nicknamed the Pearl of the North, it is one of the cleanest cities in all of China. It is full of giant squares, tranquil parks and lots of green areas. From what I've heard from others who had lived in other parts of China, I am very lucky to have landed here. I'm probably ruined for any other city.

These are the characters for Da lian, meaning big thoroughfare or big intersection.

As you can see from this map, Dalian is surrounded by the sea and has a large coastline.

DOWNTOWN. At night they light up this ball with green and purple lights and in the trees they have what we would call Christmas lights. It is beautiful. In fact, most of the buildings have "Christmas" lights on at night.

Not every building is brand-spanking new. Remove the Chinese characters and this building would be at home in downtown Naples.



DRUM CORPS: After watching this group, my new goal is to retire and become a member of the all-female drum corps.

DESIGNER DOGS: Before arriving here I was expecting to see a lot of mangy street dogs. While there are some of those around (and they all look like smaller versions of my old Tater-girl), there are a surprising number of breeds. So far I've seen Pekignese (of course!!), schnauzers, cocker spaniels, golden retrievers, and even a Dalmation. My neighbors across the way have a great dog that looks like a mix of bulldog and sharpei. He rules the terrace and terrorizes the chickens. I think that owning pets is probably a sign of the growing prosperity in this city.

Week 3: C

CENSORSHIP and CAMERA (broken): A shattered camera and blocked websites delayed my start on this blog, but now that I've found a proxy server to circumvent the firewalls and I purchased a new camera (at a huge subterranean Walmart, no less), I should be catching up soon.

CHINA: Happy birthday, China! October 1 was its 60th birthday.

CHINESE: Did no one warn me that they speak Chinese in China? What an impossible language! It is very humbling not only not being able to say anything but also not being able to read or write anything. It takes all of our resources just to do the simplest things. For example, to catch a bus for our day trip the other day, we had to have someone text us the Chinese characters so that we could show a taxi driver where we needed to go. I wasn't sure what the text said, so I had to forward it to a friend who had to call me with the translation. The taxi driver, after much grumbling and pulling out his reading glasses to read our text message, delivered us to the right general area, but we couldn't quite locate the bus. I called our contact but her English wasn't good enough to tell us where to go (and our Chinese is pathetic), so we had to hand the phone over to a man standing near us and he told her where we were. She came and retrieved us like lost lambs. And tonight for dinner we tried to order on our own, but eventually had to call one of our colleagues and have him order for us. First, we had to ask him what the waitress thought we had ordered, then we had to have him clear up our mess. The three of us at dinner hold a total of eight degrees. Did I mention that Chinese was humbling?

CHOPSTICKS: The Chinese teachers in my office were laughing the other day because they said that only the foreign teachers use chopsticks. I looked up from my intense study of rice falling between the chopsticks to see that one of them was using a fork and two were using spoons--slackers. One good thing to know: Never stick chopsticks straight down into food. It looks like incense at a funeral and represents death.

CHEAP: Some things, especially the food, are really, really cheap here. My roommate bought enough CLAMS for five people and it cost under a dollar. Our full meal at a pretty fancy restaurant tonight cost 65 Yuan, that's about $3 a person. If only I were capable of ordering my own food, I would definitely eat out more often.

CARNIVAL RIDES at Xian Park.

Week 2: B

BINGYU VALLEY: Yesterday, three of us took a long day trip to the Bingyu Valley (pictured above). This "oxygen-rich environment" (words from the promotional material) has lakes, towering cliffs and a waterfall or two. We think something historical happened here, but since our tour guide didn't speak any English, we were finding out information from a Japanese woman who understood Chinese pretty well who translated it into Dutch to her boyfriend who explained it to us. We were just happy when the bus didn't leave without us at the end of the day.

BEACH: Just a 30-minute walk from my apartment and a 10-minute walk from our school is Xian Park. It features a lovely seaside promenade (perfect to fare una passeggiata). It's not the biggest beach in Dalian and it doesn't have the expanse of sand that other beaches have, but it does have its own appeal. I went there one Monday morning and watched a group of senior citizens ballroom dancing while another group of senior citizens performed tai chi.

The little guy in this picture was wearing a shirt that said, "Guy Pratt Motors, Wichita, KS"

More evidence for my theory: Wherever you find water, you will find tacky souvenirs. Now, family, aren't you sad that I didn't get your name in the Christmas draw?

BUNGEE JUMP: Maybe, maybe if someone double-dog dared me I would do the bungee jump at the beach. We worry, however, that when they consider safety measures for these types of things they think, "In a country of 1.3 billion what's one or two lives lost plunging into the sea?"

BADMINTON: I love that the Asian news channel that we get on our satellite TV runs the badminton scores on the scroll at the bottom of the page. If you want to hear about the Japan Open results, just let me know. (Hint: a Chinese woman won.)

Week 1: A

ARRIVAL in China: I knew that life was going to be different for the next six months when they served us Cup of Noodles as a snack on the airplane! After safely passing through the two H1N1 virus screeners, I was officially welcomed into the country.

AIRPORT in Beijing: The airport is a showcase. Huge, streamlined and sparking clean. It's a little odd to be sitting across from a TCBY and a Hugo Boss store while, at the same time, not being able to decipher any signs.

APARTMENT complexes: In a city of 6 million people, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the rows and rows and rows of apartment complexes. There don't seem to be any zoning rules. So, on our block we have a liquor store with no entrance--just a walk-up window--a travel agency, and a welding workshop. Across the way someone is raising roosters and chickens on her terrace. This is a picture of my street. good ol' Taoshan Jie.