new school

My current school is the polar opposite of my old school in Songyuan. They recognize that Chinese students are really good at memorizing, and that memorization is the backbone of most English education here, not actual learning and comprehension, so they take a different approach.

In Songyuan, I was making up almost all of my own course material and curriculum. Here, for 90% of the classes, the curriculum and even the lesson plans, minute by minute, are already set up based on their philosophy.

Chinese teaching partners gather all the materials and make sure everything is ready for classes, so really, all foreign teachers need to do is show up to teach what they're told most of the time. There are no textbooks. Most classes (outside of feature art, drama or test focused classes) are based around a story. Each class has songs, games, activities and arts and crafts using language from the story, so students have a better chance at actual comprehension. It's also a lot more fun for kids than staring at a textbook for an hour. In most classes, you basically never do the same activity for more than say eight minutes.

It does have a tendency to make you feel a bit like a dancing bear (sing this song, play that game, teach this nursery rhyme, read that story, sing this other song, etc. with none of it being your idea), but you can make little tweaks to the lesson plans to make them your own, which makes you feel a little less bear like.

The school focuses on kids two to 12, but most of my students are between four and six. The max class size is eight, so you get a lot of time to focus on each kid. Naturally, this is a huge change from teaching mostly adults in large classes or teenagers one on one. It takes a lot more energy, but a lot less of the not-so-fun office hours for lesson planning and the like. Wracking you brain for things that are going to keep both you and the students interested and also teach something got kind of difficult at times.

Naturally, it has its problems though.

All the stories that classes are based around are unique, created just for the school, but many aren't really stories, in that they don't have a beginning/middle/end, or a point at all. I think that's offset for the kids though by the fact that they ARE in a non-native language. Many of them have some repetition throughout that the students like to chime in with (if they haven't already memorized the story to tell it word for word with you).

A lot of the English songs or nursery rhymes are a little off somehow, in words, melody, something. Part of this comes from the fact that Chinese people are finding and executing the materials and part of it comes from the fact that the bulk of the lesson plans and associated materials were created by an older man that grew up in the States but lived in the UK for most of his adult years, so he's got American and British ideas mixed into one idea.

Regardless, I think they have a good strategy. My SO disagrees and is of the textbook/study/grammar/sentence structure school, but to each their own.

All the foreign teachers' contracts are structured a little differently; they like to try to make use of everyone's talents. My SO has created the curriculum for a theater class where the kids create the costumes and set as well as put on the final performance. The guy that wrote the lesson plans does a lot of video editing (you might not think a school requires a lot of video editing, but apparently this one does?). Another guy I met up in Songyuan handles a lot of admin stuff.

As for me, I'm contracted for up to 30 hours a week: up to 15 teaching hours and up to 15 office hours, which have including, marketing, event planning, social media management, graphic design and interior design. More on my non-teaching stuff later. For most of us, the rate for our teaching overtime and whatever various other overtime is different, but better than Songyuan and we get paid for office hours.

It might not sound like foreign teachers require office hours, considering the lessons plans are mostly set and the Chinese teachers gather the materials, but feature courses, or those outside of the core program, fall outside of those plans, and also they're big on parent communication. If anything major happens in class, good or bad, I touch base with parents afterwards, but we are also required to fill out monthly progress reports on all students. It can be extremely time consuming, some kids are so middle of the road, nothing great, nothing awful, nothing ever changing that I have to reference all my past reports to make sure I'm not just repeating myself.

All in all though, it's not a bad gig and is MILES better than SAGE Foreign Studies Academy.

trust issues

Chinese people have very interesting ideas about trust. I am forever having Chinese friends or even strangers on the bus, tell me to be mindful of thieves trying to steal my purse. It has a long strap, so I wear it diagonally across my body, and it usually falls behind me. It has a snap closure, so I very seriously doubt that short of cutting it off of me, there's any way anyone could relieve me of it, or any of its contents, without my knowing. They always want me to wear it in the front though, so I can see it and be sure.

Chinese are also people that put bars on their apartment windows... regardless of whether they live on the first floor, the sixth floor or the twentieth floor. Naturally, The Crack Den 2.0, my old first floor apartment in Songyuan, was an unfortunate, rare exception to that rule. People were always telling me there that I shouldn't open my windows even if I was home because I might not hear an invader. Here in Xiamen, my eleventh and a half floor bedroom windows have bars on them (though they're not very secure so I'm not even sure what the point is). My eleventh floor living room balcony does not have bars.

So you have things like that, where people are maybe a touch paranoid, but then you have things that go 180 degrees in the opposite direction...

As I've mentioned before, China basically doesn't have clothes dryers (I have met one person that owned one in past 14 months). The washer will either have a killer spin cycle or it won't spin at all and you'll have to manually move the clothes to the "dryer", which will just spin them a bit.

So everyone hangs their laundry out to dry. Everywhere. Apartment building rooftops, public parks, in front of restaurants, I mean everywhere; there is always laundry hanging in random places you KNOW nobody lives. And apparently no one is worried about their clothes being stolen. Now, I don't worry about my purse being on my back or someone coming in my eleventh story window (heck, if they can manage that, I will just GIVE them something for the effort, I'll be so impressed), but my laundry is something I wouldn't leave to dry outside of my own apartment.

More importantly than clothes, let me tell you about money. Actual money. A lot of businesses that I frequent don't have a cash register. Maybe they have a cash drawer, a completely unorganized drawer full of loose change and bills with absolutely no system of accounting for it at all. Or if they're fancy, maybe they do have a cash register, but usually the cash isn't divided like you might think, with a slot for the 1s, a slot for the 5s, a slot for the 10s and so on and so forth, the cash register is just a facade for the cash junk drawer. And it's common for someone to give me change out of their own pocket instead of the drawer. You trust your employees this much?! Granted a lot of businesses are small and family, but not everyone there is family...

And then there's the weird situation I am in with my rent and utilities. I pay rent quarterly here, same goes for utilities (water and electric). My landlord gets the bills for the utilities and then I pay when I pay rent.

After living in my apartment for one quarter, when I should have seen my first round of utility bills to pay, the property manager said she didn't have them because she had too many properties to manage, she just told me an arbitrary amount and expected me to pay. After quite a bit of back and forth, I paid the random amount and she agreed to email me all past and future utility bills. Never got a thing. 

After the second quarter I was here, I asked for the bills so I could pay, but she wouldn't even let me pay rent, she was on holiday and couldn't be bothered to pick up any money I transferred to her. I ended up paying rent three weeks late and still no utility bills. She told a Chinese friend of mine if she didn't produce them I didn't have to pay.

This sounds great and all, except that this woman has 3,500 RMB in deposits from me that I want to get back when I move out- 3,000 RMB for the apartment and 500RMB for utilities. I'm thinking if she keeps not asking me to pay, she's going to screw me in the end, never show me any bills and keep my deposit. My Chinese friend says that the landlord and I are friends so she probably just won't make me pay at all. What?

So, we don't trust people with purses and breaking into our apartments, but we trust everyone in the public with our laundry, all employees and utilities don't need to be paid... or something like that.

skewed vision

Chinese people have a bit of the same stereotype-y ideas about looks that we do. The same way that someone in The States might say all Chinese look the same, a lot of Chinese would say that all non-Chinese look the same. 

In Songyuan, many Chinese thought my black, Jamaican friend and I were sisters. Tonight on the street, someone told me I look like Beyonce. I'm about as white as they come.

So, clearly, there are some interesting things with perception going on here.

But I've come across something else pretty funny recently. I dyed my hair hot pink a few weeks back, and naturally have gotten quite a bit of attention for it. What's been surprising to me though, is the number of Chinese people that think it's my natural hair color.

After assuming it's my real color, they will almost always tell me there is something wrong with me. I don't even know what to say to that. I can't imagine even a child anywhere else possibly thinking this color was natural.

Bikram (or something like it)... finally

Being that Xiamen is a decently large city, I was able to find a small yoga studio down the street from my apartment that actually had Bikram yoga (yay!)... or so they advertise.

Bikram is a pretty specific kind of yoga— it's an hour and a half long series of 26 poses, each repeated twice. It's done in a hot, humid room, so sometimes hot yoga places will try to call themselves Bikram studios, but if it's not this specific series, it's not Bikram. So being able to find an actual Bikram class here was theoretically great, because even though I wouldn't understand the instructor, the series is the same so I'd still be able to do the class.

The studio is pretty cute, it has one studio with the requisite mirrored walls, save for an ocean scape on the fourth wall, and can only handle maybe ten practitioners per class, which I really like. This studio is a little different than the last time I took a yoga class at the gym; it isn't nearly as quiet and relaxing. Even though we do meditate sometimes, people talk and grunt and fart and laugh as they please. The room is actually really loud until class starts, and people come in late and leave early and answer their phones without a moment's pause.

After I found the place, I bought a yoga mat and a package of classes, got the class schedule and started showing up to the Bikram classes— and then I was just kind of confused. In the classes, it was usually obvious that the instructors had seen a Bikram video once or twice, or had some basic knowledge of it, but there were only maybe one or two Bikram poses in each session.

The classes were pretty funny though at first. There are two instructors that speak no English and seemed pretty worried to have me there (the third Bikram instructor was an environmental engineer or something cool like that in Seattle for like seven years, random). Basically, nobody else speaks English either, neither the front desk staff nor the other practitioners, so it's pretty much all a game of charades.

Once they figured out that I had some yoga background and was halfway decent at guessing what they meant when they called out positions and corrections, they relaxed a bit. If I'm not understanding something they'll usually stop walking around and demonstrate or just come over and fix me. They are not shy about touching practitioners... or climbing up on us and pulling on us with all their might.

There's one instructor that really beats on us, and she can't for the life of her understand that I'm not flexible in the same ways as Chinese people. She pushes me like nobody's business on positions that require hip or lower back flexibility and kill me, and then is really surprised when I can do backward bending positions or things that require shoulder flexibility better than her.

After I'd been going to classes for a few weeks, the front desk handed me a written note one day asking me to call two hours before I'm coming to a class, which made me laugh and lead to my biggest Chinese victory so far. I had a friend teach me how to make the call ("Hi, I'm the foreigner. I'm coming to yoga class at 6:15pm. Thanks."), and the first time I did it they understood me on my first try, no repeating; win!

Now, it turns out there's usually one or two people in class that speak a little English, so they will occasionally collectively ask me questions or say things to me. The first thing they usuaully comment on is my being an American and being skinny, which I never have a clue what to respond with.

I also found out that the classes I go to used to be straight Bikram, but the Chinese complained, they think it's too boring and repetitive. I guess I understand that, and even though it bums me out, I'm still happy to be able to get some kind of work out there.

Club 1801

Being a big city, Xiamen has a decent variety of both bars and clubs (I think of a club as being a place with a dj and, theoretically, dancing and the like). The bars primarily function like western bars, but the clubs are definitely a little different.

Most of them don't have a large dance floor, rather almost all of the space is occupied by tables, both low ones to sit at and tall ones to stand around. The small dance floor they usually have is actually a runway or stage, for they all have some kind of live entertainment that happens at regular intervals every evening. They have fashion shows, singers (western and Chinese) and dancers, and sometimes they have themes.

 
Guests hang out at the tables and play Rock Paper Scissors (yes, seriously) and Chinese dice for drinks, with small breaks for dancing and watching the shows.

Westerners also prove to be a good attraction for the clubs, so they all have some kind of system of giving foreigners free drinks. And this is how I came to work in a Chinese nightclub.

One of the floor shows at my club, a singer and models.

The clubs all have some pretty decent screens to play whatever on all night.

When I first got to Xiamen, I found I had a lot of free time- MUCH more than in Songyuan. I was out at a club one night and the manager of the International Department (aka the people in charge of bringing foreigners in and keeping them happy with free drinks) asked me if I wanted to work for him. I declined for a while- as a general rule I'm not a fan of clubs; I don't like to dance and, as a non-smoker, I don't like cigarette smoke. Eventually I came around though, the pay wasn't great per hour, but it was an additional half month's teaching salary for just hanging out and drinking with people every other night (oh yes, I got to drink).

I worked every other night from 10:30pm to 3:30am and if foreigners came in, if they knew anyone in the International Department, if they were good looking, if they looked like they weren't going to buy their own drinks, my job was to set them up with a table next to the stage, complete with all the free bottles of vodka or whiskey and mixers they could drink. Oh, and there were always snacks too.

If they were lucky, or more likely if they were friends of mine, I could usually pull off getting them free beer or a bottle of champagne (these being my personal preferences for beverages). The club was pretty particular about the drinks we could give away. Outside of bottles of vodka or whiskey, there was usually a limit to how many beers or bottles of champage we could give out in a night, and those were really our only other options for a table.

If lone foreigners came in, we had cards for single free drinks we could give out for them to redeem at the bar. When I first started, the cards were open, any single mixer drink or even a just Coke or something was game to trade for a card. About halfway through my time there, they switched and had three sets of cards made with a specific drink designated on each one, further limiting the options for free drinks.

The International Department consisted of my boss, myself and up to three other International Consultants (awesome job title, right?!). There were always supposed to be two Consultants working, and my boss was usually there. I really needed another consultant to be working, because outside of us, no one at the club spoke English, so I couldn't order drinks, or key them in to the computer myself. I did manage to communicate enough with the front desk hostesses to be able to tell them when I needed to tables and have them kick out the Chinese for me though.

The club routinely removed Chinese from tables to fill them with westerners drinking free drinks, which made me feel pretty bad at first, until I realized that a LOT of people at the club were paid to be there. They were supposed to act like they were having fun. When the small dance floor was empty, a bunch of them would get a text message telling them to go dance and make it look busy, or whatever the club wanted. Some of them were men, most were women. Some were models. Some were hookers of course. Most of them weren't allowed to drink. Eek.

There was one girl in particular that worked every night. She wore the same silver dress every night, wore the same disco ball Mardi Gras mask, stood at the same corner of the bar and had the same bored expression on her face. Every night. She ignored everyone that talked to her and confused the heck out of me.

Before I accepted the job at the club, I told my boss that I was new to Xiamen, didn't know many people and wouldn't be inviting the few I did out every other night like a club promoter. He said that was fine. Naturally, not long into the gig, he was asking me how many people we had coming every night. I'd mostly just make numbers up. If I hadn't seen a club kid in a while I'd text them, and when new foreigners came in, I'd give them my number and tell them they could text me next time so I'd have their table ready, but I'm neither obnoxious nor a salesperson.

The "having the table ready" line was actually kind of funny, because the foreigners' tables are all sort of interchangeable. Because the drinks are all free, a group never really has "possession" of a table to the point that they can tell other foreigners to leave, foreigners kind of just all mingle around all the foreign tables and drink whatever is on any of them. It can be kind of awkward at first, until you figure out what's going on, when a couple strangers walk up to your table, grab your booze and pour themselves a glass (this happened to me the first time I went as a patron).

Working at the club would have been a great job... if I was like 22. I found that most of the same people came in every night, and most of them were nice enough, fun to party with, if a bit young. In this way, going to work was more like going to hang out with my club friends every other night. But on the random nights when no one came in, it was oh so very boring. Add that to the aforementioned reasons for turning the job down initially, and the fact that staying up till 3:30am every other night is pretty challenging, and you have me quitting after a month.

I also had some issues with my coworkers. I've got a pretty strong work ethic (tip of my hat to my Midwestern parents), so I was always at work at 10:30pm on the dot and I stayed at work, in the building, until I was off at 3:30am. It took me a few weeks to figure out, but when my Chinese coworkers (that I relied on to get our guests drinks) were "at work", they'd often put in an appearance and then leave. Even though the bartenders knew me, they still wouldn't help me when the other girls weren't there, because none of the departments really work together or stick their necks out for each other.

And then, even for the initial appearance, the other girls were usually at least 45 minutes late, stranding me with no way to do my job. One in particular was usually hours late, if she showed up at all. We didn't have a time clock or anyone to check in with, so no one knew and it was pretty frustrating. 

A few weeks in they bought a fingerprint time clock. My boss told me it wouldn't matter to me because I was on time, but the other girls would get docked 50RMB every time they were late. Now, a 50RMB deduction for being hours late is nothing really, but it's better than no consequences I suppose.

At first the time clock worried me a bit, because as a foreigner on a work visa with a Foreign Expert Certificate for teaching, the only job I can legally do in China is teach, and only for my school, so any record of me at all at the club was no bueno. I got paid cash under the table, naturally.

I certainly didn't look like I worked there, I just looked like a club kid that knew the system. I could wear whatever I wanted to work, there were patrons that came in more than me and I couldn't talk to anyone else that worked there.

All in all it was a good experience, I made some easy cash and met a couple of people I actually still talk to, but I'm definitely happy to only be going to the club about once a month, instead of every other night!

Xiamen teaching options

My significant other recently moved to China, we planned on it for about six months beforehand. The plan was for him to teach English as well- it's just about the easiest thing for a native speaker to do here right off the bat. I said I'd do all the front work of the job search, scout out the good places to work and just tell him who to reach out to... which proved to be pretty depressing.
Xiamen is a lot bigger than Songyaun, so I figured there would be a lot more decent schools here. Not so much. Almost every English teacher that I know had told me enough horror stories about his or her school that I was basically left with my school, one other private school, private schools I didn't know or public schools to send him to. Everyone was working too many hours, not getting paid their full salaries, not getting paid on time, getting screwed on time off or visas or something else. Having been through that at my last school, I wanted to avoid putting anyone else through that at all costs.

I also wanted to be sure he had a work visa before he got here. More than half of the English teachers in Xiamen are teaching illegally on tourist visas. If you're only teaching private lessons, this is no problem. Even if you're teaching at a school, most of the time, this is no problem. Until it is.

My school, for instance, is right next door to another English school. In July last year, the other school got mad at mine for some reason or other and called the cops. There happened to be two girls substitute teaching classes on tourist visas when the raid went down, not even regularly teaching for the school. Both ended up having to leave the country soon after.

And my school is a good one. My biggest complaint about them is the way they handled my time off with a trip I took back to the States in September/October, and about 75% of that can be chalked up to Chinese culture, not maliciousness on the part of the school.

My school, the one other decent private school and not working at a school, just giving private lessons ended up being his final three choices.

visa lording: yep, there seriously was more

My school in Xiamen began working on my visa paperwork (to the best of my knowledge) in July when I committed to work for them beginning in September. They were asking me for pictures and copies of things, so I was thinking I'd get here and it would be ready. Once you already have a work visa in China, paperwork can just be transferred over, so after the first Hong Kong embassy visit, you never need to go again.

When I got here, the paperwork was all still in the works, but after a few weeks they told me they needed a "recommendation letter" from my old school (it's actually just a standard form they need filled out and stamped). With that, they could transfer my Foreign Expert Certificate and viola, I'm an expert and can get my Residence Permit and be legal again.

When I left Songyuan, and all of SAGE English School's terrible bullshit, with my visa finally in hand, I assumed that their influence on my life was over. I was still careful though; a coworker of mine there was planning on leaving (due to the usual bs with visa/hours/pay/etc.), so I had talked her into moving to Xiamen as well since she was leaving anyways. She made a midnight run and left the school with no word, which didn't help matters. I made sure not to post any pictures of us together on facebook (I'm friends with a few of the Filipino teachers that have been there forever and are friends with the VP), so as far as tangible proof goes, I had done nothing to harm their school and was actually the only person in the past nine months that had successfully completed a teaching contract.

Unfortunately, my new school didn't tell me about the recommendation letter until two days after I felt safe enough to post the first picture. Eek. So I emailed the owner and the VP asking them for the letter and crossed my fingers.

To my surprise and delight they said it was no problem and told me one of the school's errand runner guys would help me out when he got back from holiday. I emailed the guy and cc'd them and sent him messages on QQ as well and then waited. And waited.

I emailed the VP a few times to ask when the guy would be back to help me, she told me to contact him directly and gave me his phone number. I called and texted him and still nothing. Finally, after three weeks of runaround, he messaged me back on QQ saying that he wouldn't help me because I said something bad about the school and everyone knew. When I answered that the school owner had actually told him to help me, I got this email from the school's owner.

What?!? Leaving out the random std and criminal bits (again, what???), SAGE Education Group has quite the negative reputation to begin with without me needing to say anything, both in Songyuan and online. Aaaaand this was the point at which I actually threw up my hands, exaggerated cartoon style, and said screw it.

I told my new school that the old one wasn't going to do the letter. I had told them from the start that I was concerned about the old one saying no, and I kept updating my boss, so she wasn't surprised and had found a way around it by the time I broke the news.

Yay new school, yay being away from crazy town and yay being legal right out of the gate!

the hunt

Cost of living in Xiamen is much higher than either Songyuan or Tianjin, both due to the easy availability of more entertainment options and more western establishments, but also just because of the aforementioned size and economic factors of the city. This made my initial move here a bigger financial burden than expected. If I'd known about all the up front moving costs and been prepared I'd have been fine. I was not, soooo, it was not the most fun thing ever. I definitely had to get an advance on my salary to make it work, which is actually pretty common, but still, not a thing I think any westerner likes the idea of.

My school here didn't give me a fully furnished apartment as part of my contract, which had its pros and cons (and ended up proving to be the biggest struggle, naturally). My salary was theoretically higher to compensate, but now that I know all I know, it's just plain harder to save money here than Songyuan. Salaries are lower relative to cost of living. I'm really happy I got to choose my own apartment though. It has Chinese quirks, but quirks I'm comfortable with. It's a place I'm ok calling home (for a year), and I really like the area I live in. That said, it was definitely challenging to find and settle in to.

When I left Songyuan to travel in August, I was headed to Xiamen at the end with intentions of crashing on a friend's couch here until I found my own place. About a week before I was to arrive, my friend skype'd me to tell me he was moving back to the States and he'd be gone by the time I got here. No bueno. Luckily, his roommates were still fine with me staying on the couch, but of the three people in the apartment, I'd only met two of them before moving in with them, and only met them once at that.

Their apartment was great, and they were really nice people, but there were some obvious drawbacks. It was the hottest month of year and their apartment had ac everywhere EXCEPT in the living room, so sleeping was virtually impossible. They also all kept different schedules from each other and different schedules from me, so people were coming home drunk at 4am and ordering McDonald's delivery while others were getting up at 8am to go to make breakfast and go to work. It was exhausting.

View one direction from one of the balconies of my friends' 30th floor apartment. Not bad, not bad at all.

Finding an apartment on your own here is virtually impossible, not being able to read or speak. Most people have to use a real estate agent to find a place. Agent commission is half of one month's rent. Otherwise, there are a few local websites for English speakers where people post roommate wanted ads, sublets, "will" down apartments when they leave and things of that nature. As part of my contract, my school had to help me find an apartment, but after three weeks of searching and no dice on one that I was comfortable with, I went on a local forum and found a Chinese woman offering her apartment hunting services for less than an agent.

While she was looking, I decided three weeks on my new friends' couch was more than enough; it was time for another temporary move. I moved to an area further away from things (like my school) than I wanted to be (15 minutes commute instead of 5, boo hoo, woe is me), but I had a room with a bed and ac (yay!), and a bathroom and all that. I paid a pretty cheap rate to live there for half a month while I kept looking for my own place. The guys that lived there had actually both come to Xiamen from Songyuan, so we had a lot of friends and experiences in common, which was great.

I shared my room there with a friend from Songyuan that I had talked into moving to Xiamen around the same time I did. My school had been screwing with her visa, her pay, her schedule, etc. and she wasn't happy. We both discovered that moving into apartments in Xiamen was going to be more expensive than we had anticipated, so we decided to split the temporary room costs and share till we found our own apartments.

The woman I found on the forum ended up finding my current apartment after a little less than a week of looking, so we weren't there for very long anyway. She also negotiated the rent down a little bit for me, which was of course awesome.

In China, you pay rent quarterly, so to move in to an apartment you have to pay four months' rent right off the bat (three for the first quarter you live there and then one for the security deposit). On top of that, you probably have to pay your agent fee. You need to pay to change your locks when you move in since so many agents have the keys to one apartment. Then there is something akin to HOA fees that you also pay quarterly. You have to put a deposit on your utilities if you don't pay them directly each month, like me. Then there's internet, you pay for the entire year of service at once, you pay for setup and then if you have to buy wireless router that's an additional cost as well. There's drinking water, to get a water machine with the large jugs you have to pay for a large quantity of jugs up front and then they just deliver them to you as you use them up. And then, even for a furnished apartment, you need to buy normal house-y things, like plates and chopsticks and bedding and towels.

All said and done I paid more than two months' salary to get myself set up in this apartment. Eek.

I ended up in the below one bed, two bath, loft apartment on the eleventh floor of a large building that's also home to a somewhat bizarre variety of businesses. My boyfriend was moving to China to live with me at the end of December, so I got a bigger, more expensive apartment than I would have if I'd planned on being alone. The friend that shared the room with me while we were looking ended up staying with me here too until December so we could split costs and she could save money to tackle getting her own apartment.

I feel the need to stipulate that the below photos are pre me moving in a giving the place a serious deep cleaning.

my lofted bedroom

Yes, that IS a seriously random low bit hanging down from the ceiling in the middle of the bedroom that I constantly hit my head on.

living room

This is my master bathroom. "Complete" with three walls, one being frosted glass. I did mentioned apartment quirks, right?

It's hard to tell, but there is something serious missing here... any type of cooking surface under that large hood fan. And the appliance under the counter? It's a dish DRYER not a dish WASHER.

Major quirk #3: the urinal in the downstairs bathroom. And no, I don't use it.

I'm baaaaaack

It's been a long time since I've posted or kept up with what I've been doing, but I'm back. More importantly, I'm back with the intention of keeping up more consistently. So, where did I leave off? Ah yes, my move to Xiamen, in Fujian province, at the end of August, after almost a month of travels.

Xiamen is an entirely different ball game than Songyuan or Tianjin. A LOT of what I'd noticed and posted about in my previous home cities doesn't hold true here, and I attribute that to a couple main factors.

It seems to me that northern China and southern China are very, very different- the accents (northern Mandarin is more pure), the food (northern food is saltier, southern food is sweeter and spicier), the physicality of the people (northern people are shorter and stockier with potbellied men), the general attitude of the people (southern people seem friendlier toward strangers), etc.

Xiamen also has a lot bigger metropolitan area than Songyuan (not Tianjin, but my time there was limited) with a lot more western influence. There is a huge stone export industry here that draws many foreign business people (no quarries though, explain that one to me) as well as a large, well reputed university with several international programs and thousands of foreign students.

These things, as well as some factors more directly related to my school have made my life here significantly different. Stay tuned for details...

random pix: depressed fox, terrific cops & slomed salads

Why is this children's character about to hang himself?!

Songyuan traffic police are terrific!

If this doesn't help explain plumbing in Beijing, nothing will.

Bangkok & Ko Pha ngan

I've had a kind of crazy past month. After leaving Songyuan on August 1st (post contract, for good), I went to meet my boyfriend in Thailand. Over the following ten days, we hit Bangkok, Ko Pha ngan and Ko Samui.

Bangkok is basically just another big city. Yeah, there's some cool stuff, like you'll find in any big city, but it didn't do anything amazing for me. To be fair, we didn't spend a ton of time there and didn't invest a ton of effort in exploring while we were there, but still.

The more I travel, the more I'm realizing that big cities aren't where I want to be. My favorite part of Bangkok was the smaller market/shopping street we stayed on for a while that was quite near to Khao San Road the main one, but more chill.

One thing that was disappointing there were the tattoo parlors/piercing shops. I have one anchor that needs to be redone and another that the top needs to be screwed back on; I was thinking i could get those things taken care of there. We visited about ten shops and they all either couldn't do anchors or said they could but then the piercers would flake out and never show up.

After Bangkok, we had a ridiculous travel night (think eight hour bus to a dock to sleep outside on concrete for three hours with a hundred other people all waiting for the ferry, then three hour ferry to final destination) to Ko Pha ngan to partake in a Full Moon Party.

You know you're jealous you didn't get to ride in this baby...

Apparently, they're supposed to be really crazy beach parties with lots of drugs. In the end, it was basically spring break in Mexico with more mushrooms and more fire and more blacklight paint. Fun time, not necessary to repeat. Unless you're like 19.

The other few days we were there we just bummed around with some other couples we met. We had some great beach time, cruised around on scooters and had a generally relaxing and sun burn filled holiday. The island was absolutely gorgeous and once you got away from the hectic side where the party was (or the partiers left the island), it was almost perfect.

They lied, there was no waterfall.

I say "almost" because (and this is where I get really nitpicky) we took issue with the beaches. They were clean, the sand was soft and the water was clear, but it was really shallow for a long way out on all sides of the island, so it was really hot during the day and hard to swim. There weren't any waves to play in either. If these are my biggest problems though… haha.

teacher seminar

One of the last things I did in Songyuan was teach a section in an eight day seminar for 200 English teachers from Songyuan public schools. The teachers were all Chinese and taught mostly at the middle and high school levels.

My school sold the program to the education department, which the owner had deep ties to (recall Happy Songyuan English Speaking Contest). The seminar had four sections, with one foreigner teaching each: American Culture (my section), Classroom Language, Pronunciation & Intonation and Communication & Presentation. The teachers came to us in groups of 50 and we had each group for day and a half. At the end of the seminar each teacher was supposed to give a short presentation and there was a written test.

When I was first told about the seminar, the foreign teacher/business development consultant guy at my school that had helped the school's owner set up the whole thing said he had all the material and such for each section, we just had to present his stuff. The department of education ended up making changes to the length of the seminar and the desired content the night before we started, so a lot of that went out the window anyway, but once I went through my section of the "prepared" material, I ended up just tossing it anyway. The guy had literally just pulled headings and entire sections off wikipedia for each section. I am amazed as to how it fooled anyone as being a solid program of original material, but that is neither here or there. The material for me honestly read like it might not have even been written by an American, so I just made up my own.

Even though it was a lot of extra work that I essentially didn't get paid for, I really did love the seminar. It was a continuation of my favorite part of my regular Oil Adults 2 class, a mutual conversation about culture, so an opportunity for me to learn as well.

Having never taught in a public school, unlike most of my coworkers, I went into the seminar with little to no expectations, and I was STILL surprised. The English teachers did not speak English. Most of my regular students have a better grasp of the language than the teachers did. We foreigners had Chinese translators translating literally every word we said and translating the teachers' questions and such back to us. Many of them didn't even try to use English and speak directly to me.

In each section there were maybe one or two, three tops, people with a solid enough grasp on the English language to actually have a conversation with me. I knew that the focus for English language teaching in the Chinese education system is reading and writing, but the lack of verbal communication skills still came as a shock.

Over the course of the seminar, I was also surprised to learn that many of the teachers had not been to university and many of them had no English training at all (so the above made sense), they had been math or science teachers that the school just arbitrarily reassigned to teach English. And these were supposed to be the "best" English teachers in Songyuan. Scary.

The biggest surprises of the whole thing though came on test day. The four foreigners teaching consisted of myself, the business development consultant guy, the school VP and then another American guy in his early 30s. As usual, nothing was communicated to anyone ahead of time as to how the test would work logistically, but the other American guy and I figured between the development guy and the VP being there, everything would get figured out. Boy, were we wrong.

The morning of that day was for the individual presentations, which was easy enough, and the afternoon was for the written test. The first major problem came when the development guy and the VP never came back from lunch. And didn't answer their phones. And neither did the school owner. 

After about an hour's worth of running around trying to figure out if they were coming back or not and searching for an appropriate room to administer the test that wasn't locked (and yes, this did involve marching all 200 teachers all over a high school), we finally settled on keeping the teachers in their groups of 50 and keeping each group in a separate classroom to take the tests. That left the American, myself, a Chinese school admin and a Chinese TA to administer and monitor the 200 teachers taking the test in these four rooms.

Observing the testing process was mind blowing. Every single one of them would have failed in an American testing setting. They ALL cheated. They were taking out notes, phones, dictionaries and books. They were talking loudly to each other and walking around the room to see others' answers. I could literally hear them going down their answers sheets reading, "A, B, D, C, C, A…" to each other and trading test papers, not even trying to hide it. Nothing we said could stop them or even make them feel like they should bother trying to be discreet. The American and I were just blown away.

There was a short break after the allotted testing time and THEN the others from my school came back, finally, and we got everyone together into an auditorium. The American guy and I made the "I'm disappointed in you guys" speech, which I can't say I ever imagined I'd be doing to hundreds of other adults. We accepted some responsibility, but expressed just how shocked we were, why and what needed to change according to western standards.

Cheating is such an accepted part of culture here, but to see it in action like that, and from teachers no less… wow. It made me feel really depressed. Many of them couldn't even understand that they should be embarrassed.

random pix: parks & shopping

How badass are these guys?! Cracking whips in the park.

Other things in the park.

These sandals have buckles for decoration but use bra strap looking hooks to close. Why? Why not, it's China.

I want a job where I just go around and point out Chinglish. It would be awesome. This mall sells "Clothing", in case you were wondering.

random pix: Songyuan foods

These are sold at little produce stalls all over Songyuan. I'd never seen them before, but they're called bayberries.

The flavor varies a lot from berry to berry depending on ripeness, but the most interesting thing is the texture. They're almost sinewy and they have a small, hard pits, like olives.

What could this possibly be?

Biggest durian ever!

Yes, you can order meat right off this carcass at the beer fest in front of my old school. Appetizing, no?

QRAX are for kids!

Reassuring huh?

hēi shèhu

Also, there was some absolutely crazy stuff going on in Songyuan the last month I was there, some of it involving the Chinese mafia.

A bunch of us were out to dinner about a while ago and a really drunk Chinese man wandered into our room (we usually get seated in private dining rooms). He looked at the lot of us and immediately fixated on my Canadian friend. He somehow instantly knew he was from Canada and went on and on about how he loves Canada people and somewhere in his past (University perhaps) he had been very close with a "Canada man." The guy made us all drink with him and we ended up all having to stand up and basically leave mid conversation or he would have kept us there drinking forever.

Before we left, he got my Canadian friend's phone number. He called him a week or so later and invited him out to dinner, so my friend brought a few other foreigners and they all went out. Apparently the guy was again very intensely in love with my "Canada man" friend and also seemed to be pretty shady, mentioning hēi shèhu ties (which essentially amounts to Chinese gangsters). The other foreigners were weirded out and said they wouldn't go out with the guy again, assuming everyone felt the same.

My Canadian friend continued to keep in contact with him though for some reason or other, texting and going out to eat and such. Then, one day, the guy calls my friend and tells him to come outside his apartment. The guy has a Chinese girl there and tells my friend that she doesn't speak any English, but that he should take her upstairs to his apartment, have sex with her and send her on her way. Clearly, this chick is a prostitute. Apparently, this was not so clear to my friend, because he does it.

A few days later, he comes home from school to find the Chinese man, accompanied by two other, large Chinese thugs wielding baseball bats, waiting for him. They demand 5,000 yuan to pay for the hooker. My friend says he doesn't have any money, it's all in his apartment, so they march him up there, ransack the place and take all his money (11,000 yuan total).

Songyuan is a seriously small town. The fact that this happened there is absolutely crazy to me, but my friend was kind of asking for it. In the end, he went to the police a few times (the sex factor made it a "domestic dispute" so they didn't want to get involved), talked to my old boss and a few Chinese friends and ended up getting 5,000 yuan back. Soon after, he got fired.

visa lording, epilogue

After all the crap I've been through with my visa, I couldn't be done. Of course not. Not until I get away from this wreck of a school. I have tried for the past six months to not be super negative, just objective but honest on here about them, in case anyone from school (staff or students) was reading, but I am absolutely done at this point. DONE.

Where did I leave off this saga? Ah yes, after five months of jerking me around, my school FINALLY got my work visa in early July, making me legal with just one month left on my contract. The school got me a single entry visa, so leaving Hong Kong to come back to work used the entry, but documents you get after your visa essentially act as a new visa.

In order to get the visa in the first place, you must have a Work Permit and an Invitation Letter. After you get the work visa, you have 30 days to get a Foreign Expert Certificate and then a Residence Permit. The Residence Permit is a page in your passport, like a visa, and allows you to travel in and out of the country as you please, like a visa.

As soon as I got back from Hong Kong on July 11th, I was calling, texting, QQ messaging and just generally bothering the guy that handles all that kind of stuff at my school every day to stay on top of my paperwork because I was planning to leave the country August 1st when I finished my contract and I needed to be able to get back in. He kept saying he knew, everything was fine and I would have my paperwork in time.

Then on Thursday of last week, he took me to the police station to have my picture taken for something related to that. The picture was funny, they pulled my hair back, pinned my bangs back, powdered my face with white makeup, covered my clothes with a Chinese scarf and didn't let me smile. After the photo, he grabbed me to leave, but we hadn't been given anything, so I started asking questions. He pretending not to have enough English to answer me (I know he does) and made us go back to school to have a TA translate.

There, he told me that I wouldn't have my Foreign Expert Certificate until this Thursday... after I was already going to be gone. Which would mean no Residence Permit. Which would mean no getting back into China. Which I had a bit of a problem with. My pestering had clearly done nothing, if he'd started the paperwork right away, I'd have had everything no problem.

So, I made a big fuss. I talked to my school VP, the owner, the paper work guy and a bunch of the TAs. They all said they'd see what they could do. And then no one got back to me or gave me any answers or would even talk to me all weekend.

They were essentially screwing me over because I had no leverage any more, being pretty much done teaching. I had had a tourist visa that was valid until February for multiple entries, so I would have been fine, but that was invalidated when I got my work visa. After a bit of freaking out though, I came up with Plan B. In Bangkok, I was going to go to the Chinese Embassy and get a new tourist visa, thereby invalidating the work visa. The tourist visa would then be invalidated in three weeks again when I began at my new school. Convoluted and stupid, but my best option.

Then YESTERDAY (I leave China tomorrow morning mind you), the guy tells me they'll find someone to bribe or whatever and get it done (this is commonplace). He takes me to the police station in the morning for another photo for the Residence Permit. Then in the afternoon, he leaves for Changchun to finish the Foreign Expert Certificate process, which must be done there.

 

This morning, the school calls me and tells me that he needs my original university diploma for this. Pardon me, but shouldn't he have known that prior to leaving? It's not like he's never done this before... I brought it to school and they paid someone to drive it the two hours to him in Changchun. Such a ridiculous waste of money (not that I'm complaining there).

After that, I'm calling every few hours to ask when I'll get my passport, paperwork and diploma back from Changchun. Around 6pm, it turns out my passport has been at the police station here the whole time, but everything has gone through and I have everything I need (yay!). I just need the paperwork guy to return with my original diploma before 3:30am, when we essentially trade places and I leave Songyuan to go to Changchun to catch my flight to Bangkok.

What a cluster. It will literally be within HOURS of leaving the country that I finally have everything I need. So, so happy to be finished with this school.