trash day

Chinese seem to generate MUCH less trash than we Americans do. Trash cans are tiny, think of your bathroom trash in the States, and I swear it takes me forever to fill mine at home. Granted I'm rarely home and I'm living a bit of a minimalist lifestyle, but I think it's also a function of how things are here. There is much less packaging and also less specialization of products, so when something has so many more uses than in the States, you're less apt to throw it out.

What they do with trash is kind of disturbing though, and definitely adds to the air pollution. Trash from inside apartments and businesses is taken outside and put in the garbage "cans," which are holes in the ground instead of dumpsters. Then, maybe once a week, everything in the holes is burned.

Something about burning ALL trash, plastic, aluminum, etc. included seems like a bad idea, but maybe that's just me...

random pix: non-gas mask day, peeing instructions & awesome sandwich

Ok, maybe I won't die of smog here after all. Win.

In case there were any questions on how it's done.

This I just like.

stalker calls

One of my favorite things about being here, or maybe just not being at my last job, is not really being accessible. I absolutely hated having my cell phone number on my business cards in the States, getting my work email to my phone, etc. I didn't care that my company paid the bulk of my bill, being reachable all the time and at the beck and call of others I just can't stand. I need separation of church and state; free time is free time and work time is work time.

In China, most people use prepaid phones and they frequently change numbers or have multiple numbers. If they move or travel to another city for a few weeks, they get a new number there so they aren't using long distance. Because most everything is prepaid, long distance costs extra. They aren't concerned with people no longer having their number or being able to reach them. Also, no one here has voicemail, even people with actual cell phone plans.


I think partially because of this, if a Chinese person calls another Chinese and does not get an answer, they will continue to call again and again until they reach the other person. It's not abnormal to get like six calls in a row from the same person. I have no clue why they don't just text after one unanswered call or assume the other person is busy. I think it's crazy annoying even just to be with someone that is getting a zillion calls in a row from the same person, much less to be on the receiving end of those calls.

some more fun with food

A Chinese friend took me to a traditional village restaurant the other night. All in all, it was kind of a disappointment; none of the food was very good, but I'm chalking part of that up to the fact that he knew I was up to try most anything so he ordered weird foods. Donkey meat and goose eggs were the highlight of the evening.

Notice the cages to the right, so you know your food is fresh.

 

So, about the freshness of the food...

 

Donkey meat, eh, not a big fan.

I don't know why the goose eggs weirded me out so much, but they did. They look really dirty but just tasted like hard boiled eggs. Eggs in China freak me out a bit as a general rule. Chinese love hard boiled eggs, but hard boiled eggs that are like pickled or something, maybe marinated or hard boiled in flavored or seasoned water? I don't know but I don't want to eat them.

more Korea vs China

I was talking to one of my tutoring students the other day about Korea, and the differences between there and here. She had a lot of questions for me when she heard I had been there. I found it a bit crazy that I had been and she hadn't, given that she lives so near, but it reminded me that I had a few things to add about my comparison between the two.

I went to Korea pretty much right after my skinny Chinese post, so it was pretty top of mind for me. One of the first things I noticed in Korea is that, on the whole, Koreans are much heavier than Chinese. You definitely see more fat Koreans than fat Chinese. Not sure why this is, especially since Koreans are so vain.

Also, as far as language goes, I mentioned that Korean is a simplified version of Chinese and that there is no version of the language written in Roman letters, like the Chinese pinyin. While this is true, the written language of characters is phonetic, so it can be much easier to learn how to read and write. The problem with this is that even if you can read the language and get the pronunciation correct, you still will not know what you are saying.

don't drink the waaaater

Water in China is not purified or treated like in the States. Granted, in Phoenix people don't like to drink the water, but they can. When you come to China, you are told not to drink the water unless you boil it first. Or, people told ME that at least.

My replacement in Tianjin apparently didn't get the memo though. I saw her filling up a water bottle from the sink one day and I asked what she was doing. When I told her not to drink the water she told me she had been for two days and got a bit worried. We assumed she was going to have some kind of fun stomach bug (think drinking the water in Mexico).

In the end nothing happened to her, but even the Chinese don't drink the tap water. It has a ton of minerals and such in it so they say that in the long run (or even just for a month), it is not good for you. I think because of this, they don't have drinking fountains anywhere. I was explaining them to a student the other day and she said she had seen them in movies.

I have yet to hear of anywhere here having a water softener either, and showers definitely make your skin and hair dry. I thought my body would adjust after a while, and my hair definitely has, I just wash it less, but my skin hasn't.

royalties & privacy

The fact that I write came up with one of my adult students the other day and he was asking about my blog. I'd love to be able to send my students links, but with the Great Firewall, none of them can get to see it. I told this particular student I'd send him a screen capture though so he could.

He asked me if I write about my students; I told him I do, but I never include the names of people I write about to protect their privacy. Regardless, he jokingly demanded royalties, which cracked me up.

On the privacy note though, I really do try not to include too much detail about specific people or things that might potentially bite me in the ass down the road. The English speaking contest is the only thing I would think maybe I have too much information about (as I have the actual name posted), but at present I'm too lazy to go through and take the name out of posts it's mentioned in.

I'm not too worried about anything really, as I like to think I provide pretty fair observations about everything and the rest is my personal opinions, but maybe that's just me.

My mom is a big worrier, and she's definitely pointed out a time or two when I maybe included more detail than I should have, and I consequently made some edits. She's pretty concerned about someone stealing my identity from information I put on here though. Personally, I think there's more information about me on facebook than here!

A couple of my Chinese friends have asked me why I include so many details about myself as well. I just explain that it's MY blog; it's about MY life; of course there's going to be a lot of information about me! I'm not trying to write an informational book about China.

reputation & contest debacle

My school and its owner have a bit of a bad reputation in town. All the foreigners know it, and it kind of sucks when a new person starts at my school, because we're torn between scaring them about the contract they've just signed and warning them so they know what to watch out for.

He's pretty much known for asking ridiculous things of foreigners and preying on their guilt and general niceness. There are definitely other Chinese that are way worse to work for; we do get paid, and we get paid usually within two days of whenever we're supposed to (which is the tenth of the following month), so that's good. I've also turned in expense reports without receipts and still gotten paid. What we need to watch out for is keeping track of our teaching hours, our days off, our overtime and things like that.

As I've mentioned, we're all contracted for 88 teaching hours per month, with one day off per week. We do not get paid for office or prep hours. So to calculate your salary, you can look at your teaching hours or your teaching days each month, and it can get confusing because the contracts aren't clear.

Especially with me being in Tianjin for a few months and having different pay rate there, I make sure to calculate exactly what I expect to get paid in a way that makes the most sense for me and then I lay it out in an email to my school's accountant so there are no surprises. My explanations of pay have resulted in me getting paid exactly what I thought I should each month, instead of having it spun in the more negative direction for me.

My explanation for March did result in an hour and a half long meeting with my school's owner and the vice president yesterday though. The owner is Chinese, and is kind of realizing that the contracts are open to interpretation on a couple of different points and wants to make a change.

The more I talk with him, the more I don't know if his reputation for asking ridiculous things is actually intentional and malicious, like he wants to take advantage of us, or if he genuinely doesn't realize he is doing it, or that it is happening, as he likely isn't making all the day to day decisions that affect us.

In the course of that conversation yesterday the possibility of me taking on some of the school vice president's responsibilities while she is on a month and a half long holiday came up. I'm not placing too much stock in this, as the whole graphic design for the school thing has yet to come to fruition, but it's been put out there.

The idea of a promotion of sorts is obviously initially appealing (yay American ambition), until I think about the fact that the VP gets the shit end of the stick a lot (in a "don't kill the messenger" and she is the messenger kind of way), and also I don't plan to stay here, so what do I care about moving up.

Regardless, I told them if they want me to expand my role beyond teaching, they need to lay out exactly what they have in mind and I'll consider it. They also asked how many teaching hours I can handle each week, which is a bit scary considering my schedule this week had like 50 hours.

Back to ridiculous expectations and requests though... this whole Happy Songyuan English Speaking Contest is quite the debacle. The whole contest is VERY time and labor intensive, much more so for the Chinese TAs than for us foreigners, but still. Any judging hours that we have do not count towards our contracted teaching hours for the month, and there is judging literally every day, Monday through Friday. We've even had to contract teachers from other schools and cities to come in and help us.

I asked the VP how we get paid for these judging hours at the onset of the contest and she said they count toward our office hours. I don't think she realized at the time that we don't get paid for those at all. Naturally I went to my school's owner and asked about it. He kind of tried to feign ignorance or dodge the question, but I basically bullied him into answering and telling me (and the two other foreigners I brought in with me for backup/witnesses) that we will be paid half of our hourly teaching over time rate for contest hours. We were satisfied with the fact that we had an answer and we were getting paid, but that rate basically amounts to nothing.

What makes it especially bad is that most of the judging hours require us to get to school crazy early, like five or six am. Luckily for me, I've only been involved in two days of judging.

My school is super unorganized and things happen last minute all the time though. This is partly a function of China in general, but also my school takes it to an extreme. I got a call the other evening confirming my final student for the following day, and reminding me that I was to be a judge at five am the next morning (apparently it was on the schedule and I missed it). I told them no. They NEVER hear no. But there was no way I was starting work at five am, and then with the confirmation of my final student, I was scheduled until eight in the evening. 15 hour days are not what I signed up for here.

When I told them no, the VP threw a, "Well I'll just have to tell the owner..." type comment out there to scare me. Neither of them said boo to me after that call though. Point for me!

change of plans

So, a few weeks ago, School #1 tried to mess with my life once again. My recruiter emailed me to say that my position had AGAIN been given away somehow. She said the school wanted to offer me a different position at a sister school in a neighboring city with a nearly identical contract. Knowing all I know now, I know I can probably make more money elsewhere and not get dicked around nearly as much.

I'm also finding that I really like much of the flexibility of a private school (School #1 is a public school, so I lose 90% of that) and also the way my teaching is going right now, both the students I teach and the structure of my schedule.

I was initially looking at public schools in Korea when I first decided to teach abroad. There, hogwans (aka private schools) are more of a crapshoot as far as shadiness goes, and public school jobs tend to be much cushier. I assumed that logic applied to public and private schools in China as well, but talking to other foreign teachers here, the general consensus is that private are better.

My contract with my private school has a set salary for up to 88 teaching hours per month. Anything beyond that, I get paid overtime for and it's completely at my discretion whether I get near that or not. Office hours (for lesson planning and such) don't count towards teaching hours, but since my return to Songyuan I have stopped lesson planning, I no longer need to. This setup is pretty standard.

My contract also says I get one day off per week, public holidays off, and an allotment of personal paid vacation days. Since arriving, I've worked a zillion days in a row, including holidays, and banked all my days off to take long holidays. It's working out to a vacation a month, and every other month is a loooong vacation. I actually really love this because it gives me a lot more freedom to go do things I want, when I want. It's a give and take.

My classes in Songyuan are shaping up to be mostly tutoring hours. I tutor a high school boy that will go abroad to finish high school and then attend university in Canada; he will leave in about a month and has absolutely no interest in focusing, studying or putting any effort into learning English. My only job with him is to get him talking for two hours a day. I have an amazing amount of conversations about high school girls every week, lol. He's going to take me boxing on Saturday though, so there's definitely some perks to teaching him.

I am also tutoring a high school girl that is planning to attend college in the UK. First she must attend a language school there for a year to help catch her up. She is quite the opposite of the boy, she is very focused and tries really hard. Vocabulary is her biggest challenge. I use a book for the basic structure of our daily lessons and then tie in whatever practical life things come up.

Both of them spend almost all day every at our school studying and do not attend their Chinese high schools at all, ever. They actually took a field trip back to their high school yesterday and were somehow allowed to just join their former classmates in what they call PE, but seems to be the equivalent of recess. Somehow I'm thinking security and school shootings are not an issue here...

In addition to them, I tutor a man that is the administrative assistant of a president in one of the oil companies here, an oil company translator that has worked primarily with written language and then teach my old favorite class, Oil Adults 2. I'm pretty happy with everyone I teach.

Thinking about these things and then what School #1 was offering me, I told them I was no longer interested in either contract, and I parted ways with my recruiter as well. As much as it makes me a little nervous not having a job or apartment lined up for September, I know this is definitely the better way to go.

I've just been looking at a map of China, figuring out where I want to be and then trying to find jobs there. I will probably take a holiday in May to visit a few cities I am interested in and just drop in on schools there and see how it goes. People tend to not plan so far in advance in China, and espeically since I am already here, it will be fine.

sock money

I have a Chinese bank account and I have no idea why. When I came here, I opened one as an alternative to the old man "I keep my money in a sock under my mattress" strategy just assuming that bank accounts worked the same was as in the States. Not so much.

I can't really use my bank card anywhere, especially not in Songyuan because it is such a small city; most businesses only accept cash. Also, bank cards here are Union Pay, which means you can take cash out of most ATMs here with no fee, but they are not Visa, Mastercard, Am Ex or anything like that so you can't use them to buy things online. Not even plane tickets from Chinese travel sites.

So really, all my bank account is here is an alternative place to store my cash. And not accumulate an interest. What I really need to get is a Chinese credit card. I could open an account with an international bank, HSBC is the only one with branches in China and the US, but I've heard they have ridiculous fees and baselines for how much money you need to keep in an account. Also, they don't have a branch in Songyuan or Tianjin.

I still have my American bank accounts and credit cards. My don't really keep any money there though. My plan is to go to my Chinese bank every two months or so, transfer some money into my US accounts and then pay my credit cards from there. I can't pay my American credit card bills from my Chinese account either.

My American credit cards were almost paid off, but I've had to charge things on them while being here since I can't buy things like plane tickets with my Chinese bank account. Also, my international health insurance automatically gets charged to one of them. Unfortunately, these cards aren't for international use, so I get charged a three percent service fee on everything I use them for.

I signed up for a travelers credit card (that's my "almost three" from above) before I left the States, but it was maybe two days before I left and I didn't know my address here, so the card has been sitting at my parent's house. I still haven't successfully gotten mail from them, so my mom was waiting to send it to me. She put it in the mail early this week, so hopefully I get it soon and can avoid the service charges.

I need some exercise.

I'm not a big fitness freak. I haven't been to a gym since college (no joke). I prefer to do fun things that are exercise in disguise, like hiking, biking and Bikram yoga (those are things I did on the regular in Phoenix).

Here in China pretty much all I do is walk a few miles a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. I do play badminton with the other foreigners as well, but that's maybe once a week, we play doubles and about eight or so people show up to rotate in on one court for two hours. It's more of a social activity than exercise.

I can't hike on a regular basis because there is nowhere to hike in or near Songyuan that I've been able to find. All the Chinese I know are aware that I love hiking, so I feel like someone would have told me if there was somewhere close for that.

I haven't been able to bike so far because I don't have a bike and it's been too cold. A friend of mine has an extra one he is going to give me, and it is warming up, so this one will hopefully change really soon.

As far as yoga goes, I was really excited to pick up Bikram here, but that has been a big fail. Bikram yoga is the hot yoga, but it's also humid, and it is a set series of 26 poses. There are other kinds of hot yoga, but Bikram is very specific. The class never changes, so anywhere in the world you take a class it will be the same. This sounds so cool to me, but it is not popular here at all; it's really hard to find.

Tianjin and Songyuan don't seem to have yoga studios, you have to get a membership at a gym and then take a class there. I checked out the gym in Tianjin to do this, but membership was 600 yuan a month and I didn't know how long I was staying so I didn't do it. Here, many of the foreigners go to the gym. The one across the street from my school is 300 yuan for three months and class are a nominal additional fee. Gyms here are much, Much, MUCH smaller with less to offer, but still, it's something.

I asked a Chinese TA to take me with her to a yoga class last week. I had never done yoga other than Bikram, so it was a new experience. Definitely much slower and I didn't really leave with that good "I've just done something healthy for myself" feeling. Also, not understanding Chinese, I had to look around all the time to make sure I was catching what's going on and not copying someone that was doing something wrong.

After class we asked the instructor about a Bikram class in town and she had never even heard of it. She seemed more interested in touching my anchors than trying to talk to me, lol.

As much as I kind of hate it and say it's for suckers, it might be time to take up running. Ugh....

birthdays

Chinese birthdays work differently than western birthdays. Chinese use the lunar calendar, not the solar (which is also why their New Year's is a few months after January 1st). Also, in China, they say you are one year old when your are born. So, some people are two years older in China than in western countries at times.

My birthday is November 12th and I am 27 in western years. In China, my students tell me I am currently 28 and my birthday is October 20th, so from October 20th until November 12th of this year I will be 27 in western years and 29 in Chinese years.

They also have an animal for every year, much like a western astrological sign. There are twelve animals, and every time your animal's year comes up is said to be special. Also like western astrological signs, there are characteristics for each animal, but since each animal is a whole year, I put  lot less stock in this than horoscopes. Not to say that I believe in those either, but what are the chances of every child born in a year having similar personality traits?

cupping

I went to a spa the yesterday, got a massage and tried cupping. The massage was actually good, thank god. Massages here are different than in the States. You usually don't take your clothes off unless you're at a bath house and I don't feel like the masseuses really have any training. It's usually a foot massage place that you can add an additional full body massage onto and there's a lot of shaking, jiggling and jackhammer motions involved. No bueno. Granted this place was pretty expensive compared to those kinds of places, so I guess it makes sense that it was better.

The cupping happened after my massage. I'd been warned that it is cool but painful. The glass cups are supposed to have the most give, then bamboo/wood, and porcelain are supposedly the most hardcore. I'm not 100% clear on the point of cupping but I believe it is to draw the toxins out of your skin. The literal translation of what the people that worked there told me is that it is good to do in spring because it removes the cold wind from your body.

I choose the glass cups for my first time. The woman took a small torch like thing, put it near the opening of the cups, quickly put them on my back and then twisted to vacuum seal them on my skin. The heat from the flame made my skin get sucked up into the cups.

She left them on me for fifteen minutes (ten was the baseline and fifteen was if I could handle it). To remove them, she just twisted each to break the vacuum. I didn't think it hurt at all. It just felt like a lot of pressure. Like something really heavy was on my back. It made it a little harder to breath, but not too bad.

Afterwards, my skin was all puffy where it was sucked up into the cups (naturally). The woman rubbed my back, almost like she was trying to smooth my skin back down, which wasn't the most comfortable feeling ever. The cups that left darker marks are supposedly where I had more cold wind in my body that needed to come out. The bit I'm slightly confused about here is that I'm right handed and carry a lot more tension on my right side, but my left has darker bruising.

Today I didn't shower, as you are not supposed to for a day or two after. I couldn't get a logical explanation as to why exactly, but I figured I should follow the directions I was given. Now at the end of the next day, I am slightly sore, but other than that I'm not really sure I see the point. I'll do it again though, mostly because it was different and make my second time around will be a bit more impactful.

he/she

Chinese always mix up male and female pronouns and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why. In Chinese, "he" and "she" are both "ta," pronounced in the same tone. The characters are different, but the spoken and pinyin word is the same. So for them, distinguishing between the two is completely new. Even the Chinese I know that I would call fluent in English mess this up. Random fact of the day.