Meanwhile in China
I’ve had many students explain to me that yes, this really happens.
那个学生们很累 ^____^
I’M BACK!!
Good news everyone! Tumblr isn’t blocked in China any more! Or at least I can get on it from work.
A whole new world of possibilities has opened up before me
SQUEE!!!!
Stuffed full of dumplings,
M
How's Chinaland buuuuuuuddy??? :D
GUESS WHOSE BAAACK!!!
Apparently Tumblr isn’t blocked anymore—-yay!!!
Lost in Chongqing
Somehow I seem to keep ending up in someone’s house having dinner.
It started off like this—yesterday I decided to take a trip outside of the home->work and work->home bus lines I have come to know so well and explore. I’m not sure how you go about travelling back in the states, but MY method involves picking a bus line and taking it to the very end and seeing where I end up…don’t give me that look, it’s done wonders for me so far.
So I hopped on the 835 line to ‘SomewhereInChongqingIcantPronounce’ and went off. I was sitting on the bus for around half an hour when I realized that the scenery was getting progressively greener and with a lot less buildings. It didn’t much look like at all like the Central Business District I was trying to get to, but I pressed onward anyway.
I rode that bus for another 45 min, every stop showing less concrete and more trees, until the bus stopped at its final station—a small village well outside the city limits of Chongqing where the bus driver had stopped to have lunch in the middle of the ride.
“Off the bus!” «translated»he said to me and the only other passenger on the bus at this point—a young girl holding a very tightly swaddled baby all wrapped up like a burrito. Confused, I asked the woman with the baby-burrito about my whereabouts. I didn’t quite understand what she said, but I did pick up that I was in “Big Forrest Village” and quite far away from the shopping center I was trying to get to.
So confused and very aware that my collared shirt and leather jacket made painted me as a very, very lost foreigner, I made my way through the village to kill time until the driver had finished lunch. I came across a group of old men sitting around and playing Mahjonng, with others watching eagerly around. When I showed up to ask for directions, not had I said one word before one of the man shot up from his bench and offered me his seat. Immediately the game stopped and all attention was directed at me, asking the various obligatory questions (“Where are you from? Where are you from in America”) and bubbling compliments (“Your Chinese is very good!”)—all of which I have gotten very good at answering with varying degrees of politeness.
After that, I didn’t understand a word for the next ten minutes—as a mix of the local Dialect and Mandarin came spewing forth from everyone at once. Pretend being a celebrity, but your fans can communicate solely through sign language and different animals sounds, and you can imagine how I felt. No amount of “I don’t understand” and “Please speak slowly” could penetrate the syrupy mixture of dialects all talking at once. After a while, the crowd was contented that though I very much wanted to speak with them, it was just not possible.
Finally an old woman, who spoke the best Mandarin out of them all, directed me to a waiting bus ready to leave the village. She told me that the business district was on the opposite end of the line, and that I had gone on the bus in the wrong direction, and shooed away the crowd of well wishers that had come to see me off.
I got on, waved goodbye, and as soon as they were out of sight sunk into my bucket seat. I realized that the Chinese I can speak is one of those clinical, robotic versions that we all were forced to learn back in high school—and completely useless outside of a classroom.
But I still have one year left—and if in that time I can return to that village and have a conversation with those wonderful people like a normal human being…well gosh I’d just be the happiest lawowai in China =)
BWOONNNNNNGGG!!!!!!
Power Outage adventure
So I met some of the other people in my apartment after the electricity got cut from some construction accident not too far from my apartment.
What started of as me trying to find some light to read turned into about a crowd of a dozen people trying to help me learn Chinese.
The leaders of this group were the adorable Mr. and Mrs. Xiong, who next to my own grandparents, are some of the cutest old people I have ever seen. They’re one of those people that easily could (and should) have stuffed animal versions of themselves. What makes this even better, and the point of this email, is that their name is one of the components of Xiong Mao （熊猫), the Chinese word for Panda.
That’s right folks. My neighbors are Mr. and Mrs. Panda.
I love my life so much it’s not even funny.
The kindness of Strangers
Let me tell you a story—
In a land not to far from Japan
There lived a man from the American land
Who one day decided to travel about
There lived a man from the American land
Who one day decided to travel about
And head to the old land of China
So off went this lad all bright eyed and starry
Still thinking about a fantastic farewell party
Not realizing that the path of his plane
Headed straight into the heart of a f****ing tyhpoon
So after landing in the port of Hong Kong
After a very long time bumming out in Taiwan
Still thinking about a fantastic farewell party
Not realizing that the path of his plane
Headed straight into the heart of a f****ing tyhpoon
So after landing in the port of Hong Kong
After a very long time bumming out in Taiwan
He realized that everyone there spoke Cantonese
And he had not the slightest idea of what was going on
And he had not the slightest idea of what was going on
Fast forward six hours to our hero feeling dour
As yet again he was standing in line
So that he could obtain a brand new boarding pass
So that he could obtain a brand new boarding pass
And maybe, just maybe get to work on time
So I was living in a hotel for a few days, and running out of money pretty fast. My bank card had gotten locked and then lost in Hong Kong, which made looking for an apartment rather difficult. I went without any money other than what I brought for about two weeks, and then by some weird stroke of luck I managed to find an awesome expat family that decided to take me in for a few days. They came from Australia to visit some family, and they saw me trying to explain in my terrible conversational Chinese my situation, and thought it’d be a good deed to rescue me.
Here’s the best part—they let me rent out their apartment once they left back for Australia for a third of the normal price.
So now I have my own place at Tian Ning Feng Jing, eating a bowl of homemade chao fan (that’s fried rice btw) and getting ready to dive in and not speak English for a few days. I’ll post pictures once I get a chance, but trust me it makes the village look like Linden.
再见！！
Coming up next: Teaching in China
Hey there from.China!!
I’m alive and in China. Getting over here was a total disaster. We had to fly through a typhoon (twice!) and everyone in economy class seemed to be throwing up at the same time cause of the turbulence but we made it…although my bags and bank card didn’t make it. I’ve got pictures from the Hong Kong airport showing the 6 hour wait for a new boarding pass. By the time I got it all the local hotels were full so I spent my first night sleeping on the airport floor with naught along with other sad travellers from all over the world. Really, nothing brings people of the world together like airport drama.
Chongqing is interesting—people are nice but don’t speak a lick of English, and the city itself is HUGE!!! 33 milling people all crammed together—there’s a lot of them. Food is insanely spicy. They make it so hot that it actually numbs your tongue on purpose. Buffalo wild wings dosent have shit on red style pork, just saying.
Right now I’m in a hotel that’s crammed into a mountainside. My room is clearly in the middle of a cave of somekind which actually is pretty cool.
