More on Chinese people

The good news is that I know enough Chinese now to be scammed in Chinese. But it's just not quite the same as back home, they just don't put the same effort into it.

I was approached by somebody yesterday claiming to come from Anhui, which is kind of far away from here. He showed my his drivers' license - they always do stuff like that, I don't know what that was supposed to prove - but I guess I had been thinking I could have looked to see if his story backed up. In any case, he said he needed to get to Hangzhou, so could I "lend" him 100 quai. He didn't think I'd ever been to Hanghzou; I told him it takes 20 quai to get to Hangzhou. Then he was like, he needs to eat dinner (another 5 quai) and all that. I gave him pocket change out of habit, though really he gets some points deducted for poor form...

Anyway, besides the obvious do-badders, as I've been getting to know more Chinese people I've been getting more accustomed to their sometimes Borat-level sensibilities on things. Like I was sitting at a visa office for foreigners with a girl from Nova, and we noticed some people practicing the Chinese tones. She made a comment about Americans learning Chinese, and I looked around the corner and saw that they were Asians, not Americans. As they walked past, she confirmed they were Japanese, and noted, out of the blue, "I hate Japanese people." I'm not quite sure what to say when people do that...

(As an aside, I'm still convinced Japan could brainwash the entire country with its little Doraemon and Monokuro boo cartoons that all the schoolkids here adore, if it really put its mind to it.)

Anyway, besides the Japanese issue, even relatively intelligent people just don't have any sense of personal values. I was with Julie, who I know from back in Haining, and she asked me if I had heard of the brand of her jeans, which was "Only." I told her I hadn't heard of that brand, so she told be she wouldn't buy it again. I asked her if they were good jeans, and she said they were, and I asked how much she paid for them, and she said, two, maybe three hundred. After all my times showing my friends Chinese friends the little doo-dads I had bought at the tourist market, and having them say "you paid how much for that?" this was my turn. I told her she could buy perfectly good pants at the Carrefour in Hangzhou for sixty. She told me, "Oh, yes, I didn't really pay much attention to that, I just found these and they fit pretty well, so I bought them." She was only concerned about whether it was an American brand name, didn't care about anything else.

But if you go a little bit deeper there does seem to be some nascent sense of political belief. We were talking about a mutual (American) friend who is thinking about joining the Air Force, and she said she hoped he didn't join any army. I told her the Air Force isn't really that dangerous, but she still instisted that he still shouldn't join, because armies "don't always make good decisions." So I guess we're somewhere inbetween there and individual rights...

...and back

I finally had to leave the Africans - though HK is supposed to be pretty safe, I didn't like leaving all my stuff there out of my sight. I ended up moving to the Garden Hostel (mentioned above,) which is actually a Kung-fu hostel, meaning that there was a school based there and there was all sorts of funny looking equipment lying around. They had lockers for my stuff, but it wasn't as nice. If I had stayed there again, I would have simply used their lockers (which weren't assigned and didn't come with locks) and moved back upstairs again.

In any case, having gotten my passport back without a hitch, it was time to move on to Shenzhen, back in China. I took the train - you can basically take the subway all the way there - and I ended up staying in a nice hostel near an art gallery, where I met a British guy who had also stayed in the Garden Hostel the night before. I guess the backpacker community is pretty small...

So my intention was to bring an African back with me; alas, I was unsuccessful. I met this Ugandan woman at the first hostel in Hong Kong who was looking for teaching work, and I mentioned there was an English First language school in Yuyao near me. I went over there yesterday to see if they would hire an African - I've met English teachers with worse English than her - but they told me that all positions were currently filled, which I knew was rubbish. They're always hiring good foreign teachers when they can find them. I ended up at the manager's office in what almost felt like a job interview, I think she was walking a fine line between all the African positions being filled and wanting some work for me. For the moment I'm mostly interested in meeting their foreign teachers, though I may want to make some extra money later. The lady said that there's a Halloween party coming up, which I expressed some interest in - she said she may find some sort of role for me. I need to figure out what I can use for a costume. And this time it won't be Osama again.

A short trip to Africa

So I made it to Hong Kong for my visa run, which even seems to be working so far, so I will pick my passport up on Friday. This was after a ride on the taxi, train, bus, plane, bus, bus, and a taxi, totalling about 14 hours. The whole thing almost never happened because, as it turns out, there are no taxis on National Day. I ended up having to run back to the security station at the school, ask them to call me a taxi - they weren't able to get through - and finally hook me up with a ride with someone who happened to have their car near the school - but then they only wanted to take me halfway, so then once downtown I had to keep searching for a taxi. I only made it to the station about five minutes before the train left.

Several hours and several miracles later, I arrived at my hostel. Of course, after booking it (the cheapest one I could find on the internet) I read what wikitravel had to say:

Chung King Mansions and Mirador Mansions on Nathan Road is home to some budget hotels and many budget hostels. Among those that have a long history are Travellers Hostel, Block A, 16 Fl in Chungking and Garden Hostel, 2Fl, Mirador Mansions. These, and others like them, have been popular with backpackers for decades; bookings are generally not needed, nor usually honoured! Instead, budget travellers are advised to start at the top of a popular building such as Mirador Mansions and work their way down until they find a hostel that suits them.

When I arrived there at 9:30 that night, I found out that my room had already been given away - they apparently thought I was getting there at 11 AM - so I did as the travel guide advised me and started looking around for vacancies. Mirador "Mansion" is a very strange place - I've never really been anyplace like it. It's a 16 story building, with a big courtyard in the middle where you can look all the way down. (Unfortunately, as soon as I tried to take a picture my camera decided that it had no batteries, and I forgot to bring the charger, so there will be no illustrations.) It kind of has the feel of an apartment building, I think there are some apartments, but it's really practically a city upon itself - right now I'm sitting in an internet lab on the 10th floor, I also saw some places that look like clothing factories, also some Indian clothing stores...

Anyway, another thing the guidebook warned about is hostels catering to illegal African workers...and there are a lot of Africans around here, though I think they more often fall into the category of entreprenuers than "workers." (Can't comment on their visa status.) These two big Kenyan ladies I shared a cab with said they were in the export business, and they travelled to Guangzhou to buy goods and ship them back to Africa. This was their third trip. So as I was looking for a hostel, I came upon one of these run by Africans, and they had a room available, so I ended up staying with them last night - and, again tonight, because I was in the visa office at 11 AM, which is apparently the time for hostel shopping. (Everything is stretched to capacity now for the holidays.) It's a little bit below international standards (I'm a bit worried about my stuff just sitting there in my room) but the people seem friendly enough.

This entire area is one of the more international places I've been. Stepping out the door, there is a store with a big South African flag, Indian, Korean, regional Chinese restaurants, financial services for residents of various south Asian countries...and of course Western fare. I spent the first hour or so, having spent the last three months in the Chinese boondocks, wandering around with my jaw on the floor. Almost everyone here speaks English, which is good because I can't understand the Chinese speaking or writing (though that takes a little bit of adjustment now to remember how to do that.)

Tommorow I will go shopping for things like cereal and dental floss.

Raining cats and dogs

Tuesday and Wednesday were apparently the biggest typhoon to hit Shanghai in ten years - nobody tells me about these things. Anyway, it mostly rained a lot...it was kind of a pain to get around, because nobody designs things with water drainage in mind. The local stream/garbage dump came very close to spilling its banks.

Normally this bridge is several feet above the water.

This one got totally submerged...

The Women's World Cup was apparently being held around here, and some of the games had to be postponed. One of the games in Hangzhou was pushed back to Thursday, only 24 hours before I found myself in Hangzhou. With much better planning, I could have watched it myself (I found out today that some people had some extra tickets.)

On another note, I learned something else new today. I had heard stories about these Muslim noodle shops that make their noodles out of dough. They start with a loaf, and then elongate it and fold it over itself several times, until their loaf is a long noodle. Then they give you this one noodle in the form of a noodle soup. Today I finally got a chance to try one. It's called lamian, or literally, "pull noodle," though (I learned) better known in its Japanese form, ramen. FTR, it's much better in person.

China and authoritarianism

The other day I wore my "Taxation Without Representation" shirt to class, and one of the Chinese English teachers asked me what it meant - and I was totally at a loss. Megan is actually my best teacher, and she speaks pretty good English. She understood the "taxation" part - but how the hell do you explain "representation" to a Chinese person? There's just nothing in Chinese history to tie it into. It's easy enough to explain that DC has the same special status as, say, Hong Kong, but just I couldn't get her to understand why people think that's bad.

On a related subject, I got to the end of my giant Chinese History book, (Fairbank and Goldman China: A New History) and the conclusions section had an interesting note on the lack of democracy in Chinese history. The author argues that the gratuitous violence of the Cultural Revolution reflects a paranoia that has been present for a long time in Chinese history:

Conspiracy was a continual part of Imperial Confucianism because the ruler's legitimacy was assured only when his proper conduct produced harmony between ruler and ruled. Dissent was disharmonious, and so a dissenter feigned loyalty to protect himself. Sensing this deceit, a ruler easily became suspicious if not actually paranoid. The system had little space for the open expression of opposition because policy was part of the ruler's moral conduct and so of his legitimacy. Opposition must therefore be secret. It might animate a secret society. It implicitly aimed at power. There could be no loyal opposition. In this light, for example, the pro-democacy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square on XXXX X, XXXX, since they wanted changes, seemed to the CCP elders to be their enemies. Those who expect conspiracy can always find it. (bolding mine)

I'm not sure it's quite so easy to write Maoism off as just another incarnation of Confucism though. Ever since Mao, with his internationalist way of thinking, China (with some help from India) has been the loyal opposition. In this model, their censorship and political repression actually has more of an overseas than a domestic audience in mind.

Also, thinking in terms of the global system helps answer my earlier question, about how you explain the concept of 'representation' to a Chinese person. The Chinese government 'represents' the Chinese people on the international stage, where many different forces are competing for attention, in order to get the most 'goodies' (like the Olympics.) There is even some loyalty involved here, as shown by China's recent move to dump Zimbabwe. Ever since the Sino-Soviet split really, they've made it clear that they can still antagonize the US even while maintaining some semblance of standards of their own. It is this role which has allowed them to ascend to global power status.

...I haven't yet tried explaining this concept to any actual Chinese people.

Signing on from Yuyao

...and with a new look to boot. (Now that I have pictures working, I will also get an actual picture of myself for my profile too. Then I will also need to work on getting this blog visible inside China, which will involve not quite hacking, but some technical capability, and that will be a whole new project.) Anyway, here is the entrance to the school where I work, all schools from primary on up are basically set up like college campuses.Here is my house

Believe it or not, here is the view out my back windowliterally steps from where I live, with a just broken-glass fence in between (poking in the bottom right of the photo). Apparently just a few years back this whole area looked like this (my school is just seven years old but) now the city is putting a whole lot of investment money into the area. Just a ten minute walk from school is UBC Coffee,

where they always greet you with a friendly "good morning," no matter what time of day. I wondered if I should correct them, but I finally decided they would probably take it the wrong way. Chances are whoever came up with this policy wouldn't even be the person I'd be talking to. I asked the waiter with the best English if she knew what that meant, and she said yes. Chances are that's actually a chainwide policy, since I first tried UBC in Hangzhou, and according to the back of their napkins they're in several other provinces as well.

My other haunts - an internet cafe the next block over, where I'm at now, which is a dirty place. Half the keys in most of the keyboards stick when you push them, and I think I've gotten myself addicted to nicotene from all the second hand smoke. A couple of restaurants know me well...one shop owner always says hi, even though I've never bought more than a bottle of water there. The first time I saw him he got really excited and asked where I was from, and he even managed to spit out the names of a few American cities. He doesn't speak more than a word ("hello") of English though, which limits our conversational options. Oh and these girls at a knick-knack shop downtown were amused when my brain shut down and I started saying the wrong things in Chinese...

Anyway, all things considered, I think I did fairly well on my assignment. I like the area, and the school doesn't even make me teach all of the hours that are in my contract. Some people I heard either complain a lot or didn't get quite so lucky.

Pictures are here

Okay, we'll start from the beginning...the streets of Shanghai ...where you could get some, shall we say, designer goods.





Here's Charlie...





Zenia posing with some random Asian tourist

The temple in Haining

Students from my first school

The view from the hotel at my second assignment (BTW, all these pictures can expand when you click on them)

Julie, our fearless assistant

And, finally, the Great Wall. Our tour bus is the one with the yellow and blue swirl.

Here's me

We were going to go up this other side, but from the ground you can't see that the side we went up is about 2-3 times taller.

Beijing in the distance

Scott, Matt, and Kent. You see them? Try zooming in a little closer. I think Scott's even waving at the camera.

A picture

This is a picture they took of us on our last day in Hangzhou before going to Beijing, they decided to drag us out to a college and give as a promotional thing about attending classes there. As you can probably tell, it was pretty hot that day and nobody was all that excited to be there. Also, I had just met half the people the night before, since they had had totally different teaching assignments.



Now, what I wished I had my camera for was the "fuck Japan" graffiti written (in English) on a wall outside of the school.

To Beijing

So we went to Beijing for a couple of days, now we're back in Hangzhou waiting to go to our schools. Beijing is a nice city, the weather is much better, and you can actually get wheat-based products, which is a godsend here where everything is rice-based. It's also just a nicer city in general than most of the places I've been - you have nice public parks where you actually see the old people doing taiqi and whatever, which I'd been hearing about but never seen.

Our tour guide was pretty ruthless, as usual, so we managed to see most of the major sites in three days. The first day, we went to the Heavenly Temple, which opens into Tiananmen square, with the famous portrait of Mao.That's just a stock photo, I should have real photos up soon. Anyway, the next day, we went to the Great Wall, which was one of the big things I was looking forward to. I have some really good pictures of that. We also saw the acrobats - they were cool like always.

The coolest thing about Beijing was all the Mao memorabilia. I bought myself a "Little Red Book" in English and Chinese, so I could walk around with it and offer Mao's input on any given situation. I also bought some old Chinese propoganda posters. I showed them to our tour guide, and a hilarious conversation ensued.

"Do you like Mao?" she asked me.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because he's Chinese."
"Is that the only reason?"
"Yeah...how about you?"
"I also like Mao."
"Why?"
"Because he could...well...control people's thoughts."

Indeed, he could control people's thoughts. What can you say to that?

Oh, and speaking of conspiracy theories, and strange relationships and whatever...I'm finally starting to learn more about how this whole program works, and it turns out UCE is just a relatively minor player. As far as I can tell, they seem to actually be dormant for the school year, so for those of us that are staying the year, they are basically just a recruitment agency. The people who we actually sign a contract with (we also have a contract with UCE, which is really short and basically says we should follow the other contract)...they are also basically a recruitment agency. Nova Language College, which I hear is based in Canada, is actually going to be the name on our paycheck, and I guess they're the only entity which has a contract with the actual school. For some reason I thought these strange arrangements would be less common in China than in America...that it definitely not the case.

And, finally, in the news...rumor has it that Survivor China, the first American TV show to be filmed in China, is being filmed in the next province over...too bad they don't have an English teachers edition.

High school

I'm with the high schoolers now, which is harder work - I would definitely be lost without Betty's help - but I can also talk about political subjects sometimes. One of my older classes was so good I could actually lecture them on the arguments for/against No Child Left Behind, and they seemed interested about it. Anyway, one of my favorite subjects to talk about, especially now that my kids aren't quite as advanced, is travel. It's kind of funny though, because I think I know more about a lot of things, even within China, than the students. Most of them have never even been outside of Zhejiang province, and in about two weeks, after I go to Beijing and Hong Kong, I will be better travelled than practically all of them.

Yesterday, I asked my students to write a short essay about China or something in China. Three of the best essays were about Hainan island, noting (all of them) that it's the second largest island in China (after Taiwan), and that it has a good flower market, and good scuba diving. So I asked how many people had actually been to Hainan, and nobody raised their hand. Apparently they had learned about these things on the internet, or in classes, or something.

An even more amusing episode was when I asked one class if anybody had ever been outside China. One student raised his hand, and said he had been to Taiwan. I kind of waited, and the other students started laughing at him. I would love to go and teach them blasphemous things, but I might lose my job. It's probably very easy to do in private though. I would just love it if Charlie would take us on our tour of Beijing - "please, tell me more about Tiananmen Square. What else do you know? I'm in a learning mood today." I don't want to do that to our UCE guy who will probably be leading the tour, though, because I don't want to get anybody in trouble. Charlie was so much fun because he actually worked for the government - fair game in my book.

Anyway, I'm getting better at being independent, which is good, because I don't really know how much assistance I will get at my long-term school. Betty's been helping me a lot with my Chinese - and you really can't learn it without somebody to talk to. I've been eating outside of campus a lot by myself, which involves taking a taxi into town. The first time I did that though, I walked into this one restaurant that looked a little bit fancier, but no Western food, so I assumed it couldn't be too much more expensive than a regular place. It was confusing though becuase there wasn't really a menu - often times there are pictures, but I can even read enough characters to make do without the pictures. Usually I end up ordering, ironically enough, (Indian) curry fried rice. Anyway, the place I ended up at turned out to be a gourmet fish place, and they didn't have menus because there was really only one thing - really expensive fish. So I ended up with 94 yuan worth of way more fish than I could possibly eat (you're supposed to come with friends; I pleaded with them to only give me half a fish, but I don't think they usually do that.) So after that I have been sticking to the places I know, which are mostly cafeteria - type places. They are very good, and very cheap, but they mostly serve rice and noodles. I still haven't figured out how to get main courses - probably the best meal I've had since I've been here has been some spicy Sichuan tofu that I got for 5 yuan, but with the help of a Chinese assistant - and now I'm a little bit scared to try.

Anyway, yesterday I discovered peanut butter, which I don't particularly eat in the states, but it was so good I started eating it straight from the jar. Someone mentioned to me a while back that in some of the more modern places you can get peanut butter, and I didn't really think anything of it because I don't eat peanut butter. But there are precious few sources of fats in the Chinese diet. The other way to get it is in pizza, but there isn't even really any pizza in Haining. Fortunately, in the town where I'm going, I hear there is a Pizza Hut, and a McDonalds (which I also wouldn't go near in the states, but they are one of the only places where you can get ice cream that tastes good.) Anyway, enough rambling, I'm signing off for now. Four high school classes a day is a lot more than four elementary school classes...

Various updates

Whew...its been a while. Our last assignment ended on Saturday, and we haven't taught since then - which sounds nice in theory, but I haven't been able to get on the internet at all because we keep moving around and going to hotels with shaky connections. We left Haining to go hang out in Hangzhou, which is a really nice city- the nicest city I've been in so far on this trip (definitely including Shanghai). There we got to meet up with a lot of the people who we had met previously and later parted with, so we got to share stories and information and whatnot.

One interesting tidbit I heard - right now, Zhejiang province is the hottest province in all of China. I guess the monsoons down south have been in the international news; unfortunately, we've basically missed it all (the rain always keeps the tempurature down. Someone in another city reported seeing a huge (several hundred, he guesstimated) military convoy roll through his town, presumably to go help deal with the flooding. I think someone else said their classes were cancelled for three days because of the storms. The weather here is ridiculous, and I still haven't seen the monsoon. In one thunderstorm last week I think about five lighning strikes within one or two seconds (or half a second) came within the space of about a minute - I've started to be afraid of thunderstorms again.

Anyway, the even better news is that Haining seems to be the hottest city in Zhejiang province. I was so glad because I thought the heat finally broke when we got to Hangzhou, but we got back here and it was just the same as it always was - which is somewhere about 40 degrees C, I think in the 100's F, though I'm just as happy not to know. Even the guys from Zhoushan (sp?), which was supposed to also be hot, were impressed by the heat here.

So, I'm back at Hongda, which was the first school we were teaching at, but I will be teaching at the high school, not the middle school. We actually have another two more days off before we start teaching, which will be nice. (We might even go back to Hangzhou?) The school is just as restrictive as they were last time, though, even with the new staff and everything. They insist my TA has to go with me everywhere, and of course I've already been through all of this, and I know what to do and everything, so she ends up always chasing me around, pleading "David, come back here." We shouldn't have problems though the way we did last time, for the simple reason that our team leader is way too passive (I don't know how he's going to make it through the year. Actually, I'm worried he might end up just doing anything anyone tells him to do, because he doesn't know how to say no.) Anyway, that leaves me to create the problems, and Betty, my TA, to try to follow after me. I'm not worried, they won't do anything to me, and Betty's just doing her job, they can't punish her if I refuse to follow her commands...

It's all in good fun though, in a couple more days she won't care.

Tipping...and ways to avoid real teaching

I was thinking about my last post, it isn't entirely true that there's no tipping in China. There's no tipping in restaurants, but taxis usually charge a .5 Yuan "gas surcharge" or something - basically a tip. More seriously, I've read that hotels often have a 10% "service fee" or something like that that they don't necessarily disclose in advance - that could easily do more damage than a tip in the US.

So today, for something different, I had my kids teach me about the Chinese zodiac, using Chinese characters. This is something good to do every once in a while, if for no other reason than to remind you how nerve-racking it is to speak in a foreign language in front of native speakers in a classroom setting. In any case, the kids were really impressed by me writing and talking in Chinese, and I think I remember some of the new characters. Tommorow I'm going to teach them to use a frisbee, we're near the end of our time at this school and I don't feel like teaching them too many things...and from what I've seen so far, frisbees are not available anywhere in China. I figure it'll be a once-in-a-lifetime experience..

Chilling in Haining

It's Sunday, our one-day weekend. Actually, this is the first day I've had totally off since I got here. Most of the rest of our group went off to Hangzhou, a couple of hours away. I could have gone, it sounds like they might hang out with some friends of our Chinese assistant, but my tour goes there next week anyway. So I'm 'stuck' here with my internet on my friend's computer...

This morning, me and the other person who's still here went to the Haining leather factory, which is this huge indoor mall - I mean huge - and it's all leather products. I think there might have been a bank, for people to withdraw money, and I also saw a small convenience store...just so people don't pass out during their leather shopping...other than that, it was just acres of leather. On the way back, it was kind of hard to find a taxi, so while I was waiting out on the street someone offered me a ride in his motorbike. He spoke okay English, and he had a helmet, so I accepted. Surprisingly enough, I made it back safely, so I gave him a tip, and he accepted. I'm never really sure about these things, they have a strange money culture here where sometimes they will get offended if you do these things (tipping isn't customary here.) I heard one time one of our people (actually his assistants of course) got in an argument with a cab driver, and they eventually left the cab. Just so there were no hard feelings though, he left some money on the back seat - and the cab driver saw this, crumpled it up, and threw it back at him. I've also heard a couple of stories about people bargaining, and actually getting lower prices than they bargain for. Like someone saw a leather belt for 120, and asked for seventy, and then the lady offered sixty five...I don't know if that's an expression of shame, or what. I know other places in the world you'd never get away with that...

Anyway, I'm enjoying our kind of rare down time, next weekend we will be off again, and then starting our final assignment...I have a few hours left before I have to give this laptop back to my friend.

Been a while

I'm at my new school, and internet access has been impossible. We have internet at school, but just about all of the sites I use are either blocked, or inaccessible for some reason. Yesterday I was able to sign on to gmail by using a url they haven't publicized for a couple of years; today, I couldn't.

So I'm done with Hongda middle school (though I will be back at the high school) and new we're at a new primary school. For whatever reason, all of my placements for the summer are in this one city, Haining, which I guess is good, because there are some things that are familiar. All of UCE's placements are here in Zhejiang province, so it's not like I'm missing anything too different anyway.

Our new school is pretty different. It's a little bit less, well, capitalist, a little bit smaller, and we've seen the headmaster more in the last two days then we did in the entire time at Hongda. The classes are much better behaved, and also somewhat better prepared, in terms of resources and such, but they do work us harder than in Hongda. (Our contract for the summer specifies up to 36 teaching hours a week; in Hongda we had to work in the low twenties, here were are about thirty, and all of us are exhausted. Another six hours would probably put us over the edge.) All in all, most of us like it better here, although the amenities are pretty spartan. (I will have to learn to do my laundry on my own - no washing machine or dryer.) Also the food is pretty basic, so I'm doing more eating out - which is kind of nice in its own right. Anyway, I'll keep in touch when I can. Even though we're working harder, things feel like they've slowed down a little bit, because only a few of us from our last placement came here.

So I haven't said anything yet about the actual teaching. Really, it's not like there is much that qualifies as learning. We are only here for two weeks (two and a half more teaching days) and there are no textbooks or curriculum. There is one paperback with five lessons in it - only one copy - which I got a couple of days ago, they don't really make it obvious that they were there or how to get them. Mostly, it's a matter of games, or whatever teachable thing I can think of at the moment. Both of my classes are supposedly third grade, but one of them doesn't know much of anything, and won't behave. Mostly they just like it when I watch movies with them - in Chinese - to the point that they start chanting "watch TV, watch TV" and I can't do much else. I'm trying to find what else I can do that they like that has some educational content - today I stumbled upon hangman, which they apparently know and like, and that did them for the entire period.

I guess for a lot of these schools, having foreign teachers is kind of a show piece. They charge pretty hefty fees - I heard it's like a thousand dollars for a two-week program - and nobody really knows where that money goes. The Chinese teachers get paid about a thousand yuan ($130) for the two weeks, and our assistants do it as a sort of volunteer internship-type thing. Even our flights over here probably only cost UCE something on the order of $1,000 each, and I can't imagine our other costs add too much more to that. (And there is one of us for every 25 kids.) So, this whole operation is probably pretty profitable for somebody. Our principal for this section of the school, who is the highest person we've had contact with (there is a whole high school attached, and I think somebody who has control over both units) is a pretty young guy, doesn't speak any English...but knows how to drink. He's gone out with us occasionally, and paid for us.

I guess none of this has much to do with me though...as long as they're willing to pay my airfare and give me spending money (they will starting in September) then I won't ask any questions.

Festivities

Yes, I'm not going to feel too bad about being ripped off for $16 in the streets of Shanghai when my credit card company comes along (just to put things in perspective) and rips me off for at least $80.

So yesterday, we had a sort of induction ceremony into the town of Haining. We went into the best part of town, this little upscale development which is kind of hard to describe - it's almost a city onto itself, with houses, shops, playgrounds, etc. except that it's probably less than a half square mile. First, we sat on stage, while local politicians and stuff made speeches, then we were paired with Chinese families to go eat dinner. That was kind of cool, although you'd be hard-pressed to say that they really represented Chinese families - their house was almost as big as you'd get in the states. Afterwards, there were a bunch of mini-performances from students, these old retired ladies I guess doing opera and dance, and the security guards. The police guys actually had the coolest show, they did a martial arts demonstration, doing things like flipping their adversaries over their shoulders. At one point, one of the guys actually twisted the other guy in a way that AFAICT involved almost pulling the guy's leg out of his socket. Whatever your take on Chinese politics, they do make having a police state look good.

Tensions have calmed somewhat between us and the administration - one of the main guys from our American organization (UCE) has come over for the time being, and he's been really helpful. Now if we could only figure out to do with our crazy old guy - it seems that every once in a while you get some crazy old guy (reading the blogosphere it sounds like this isn't too isolated a phenomenon) who comes to live in Asia because they can't get along with anybody in the states - only problem, we still have to put up with him until he goes out on his own. Last night he insisted on doing interpretive dance while we recited the pledge of allegiance...I think several of us inidividually are about to blow up on him, at least one person already has...

Hello

So I've been in China for about a week now, even though it feels like much longer. First we went we went around in Shanghai, did all the tourist stuff for a couple of days, before coming here a couple of hours away to Haining. I'll have pictures of Shanghai to upload at some point, but figuring out how to do that is going to be a bitch and a half. The computers here are slow, but the bigger problem is that everything is in Chinese. I can't even view my blog the regular way typing in the URL like (hopefully) everyone else can; If I want to see it I have to do it an alternate way as a pop-up window so that it doesn't have the blogspot in the URL. I had one of our Chinese assistants translate the error message I got, but it sounds like just the standard "this page is not available" message - I don't know whether or not that means it's blocked, but it happens anytime you try to access a page with .blogspot in the url. (When you just edit the pages the url is blogger.com.)

Stuff here is incredibly cheap, even if half of it doesn't work. I discovered I needed a watch, so I got a fake Omega, figuring if I needed the time I may as well look pretentious also. I paid 120 yuan (about sixteen dollars) for it...when I got back to the bus, people were telling me "man, you got ripped off, you could have gotten that for fifty." As it turned out, they were right, it stopped working the next day. So a couple of days ago, I went into a real store, and found one for twenty (which still works) - and then what I heard was "you can get those for four." Basically I guess you can get stuff arbitrarily cheap, if you know where to look.

The Chinese are very down-to-business, sometimes too much. They don't listen to people lecturing them until they show their hand, by which time it's sometimes too late. There was a whole thing going on between the teachers and the administration (and between the administration and the administration) about curfews. Hongda is a "middle school" (meaning grades 1-8), but most kids live on campus, and the entire compound is walled with security guards and such. Originally the rule was that at least two teachers had to go out together, with their assistants, and all come back by 11. Some of us wanted to stay out later, or go without the TAs. A lot of people just didn't like "the idea of it," which is kind of stupid, because you come to new countries to learn new ideas. But anyway, now two people that I know of are planning to break off early and go back home, this whole dispute apparently being a major factor. They weren't even the ones leading this revolt - I didn't even really know they had opinions on the subject. (Someone else actually stole the remote to the gate from the security guard - also not a particularly good reaction.)

I personally found the whole process of checking in and out to be kind of cumbersome, but I've also been perfectly happy to not stay out late and get rested. I also usually like having my TA when I go out to translate, so I wasn't one of the ones making the fuss. When the headmaster found out that people might be quitting, he relented on the rules, but not everyone seems to have been communicated this fact - we have a meeting with the headmaster in an hour and hopefully we will find out what's really going on. In any case, I'm still here, the food is great, though I can't quite keep vegetarian, and I'm about to go have some.