honey bread

I'm a big fan of sitting anywhere other than school or my apartment to write, work, etc. and there is a coffee shop/bakery between my apartment and school that I go to literally every day. They have wifi, which is awesome and extremely rare in Songyuan. I looooove my coffee shop.

They actually have coffee drinks too (ha), which are naturally a bit over priced due to that whole Chinese-don't-drink-coffee thing, but still really cheap by western standards. I usually drink their ginger milk tea (usually as in, I drink it enough that I no longer need to order it when I walk in); it's a little like warm, ginger flavored milk. I'm not sure what makes it a tea exactly, but I dig it.

Their baked goods are pretty tasty also, they do flaky pastry very well. Chinese bread is always pretty sweet, especially compared to western bread, and this place doesn't do whole grain or rye or anything fancy, but it's still good. Their menu varies a bit day to day and the whole thing is seasonal, so it just switched to summer. They branch out a bit from baked goods and deserts into sandwiches too, but they haven't quite gotten them down yet. The sweetness factor makes the stuff that isn't traditional baked goods a bit weird. I absolutely love that they randomly have garlic bread though.

The staff there are all really friendly, and sometimes they practice English with me or teach me bits of Chinese. They work pretty much every day, so we all know each other.

The Chinese patrons typically leave me alone, but I can always tell the ones that will eventually come up to A.) take a picture of or with me or B.) work up the courage to try to make conversation. This bugs some of the other foreigners, but I'm completely fine with it. I'll take pictures with anyone. They're all nice too.

The regulars have gotten used to seeing foreigners there. We all frequent the place; so there's a good chance of running into friends whenever I go. We all use it as a meeting spot too (if we have anything to have a meeting about, ha). It's always cool being in a small town in a foreign country and stumbling upon people you know by chance.

They always play English music there, but I'm not sure who makes their playlists. I tried asking once and I think I just confused everyone. There were some Christmas songs in heavy rotation until earlier this week when they switched to a folky, country type mix. It's kind of hard to listen to, so I made them a playlist and am going to try to get them to use it tomorrow. We'll see how that works...

my cultural tutors

I really enjoy that most of my teaching hours are spent tutoring. It means I have really close, personal relationships with most of my students. I see them all at least three days a week, (one I see six days a week!) so we spend hours upon hours having one on one conversations.

It provides a really good opportunity for mutual learning. I am interested in learning as much as I can about Chinese culture and conversely, they are very interested in learning about American culture. The differences between the two, and reasons for them, are perfect class topics. It makes me happy :)

Chinese plumbing

Chinese plumbing, like all Chinese construction, is a little jacked. Pipes leading to/from a sink, drain or toilet do not have that "s" curve that you see on a bottle of Drano or something, they just go straight down. If there is no grating over a drain, you can look down in it really far, it's kind of disconcerting. The big problem with this is that the curve we have in our pipes traps smells, so without it, all kinds of crazy, terrible smells come up from the drains.

I was telling some other foreigner friends about this the other day and they hadn't realized it but they were like, "Well that explains why our bathroom smells so bad at 7pm every night..." when all their neighbors come home and destroy their bathrooms. It's pretty gross.

Two days ago I came home to a note posted outside the door to my stairwell of my building. I took a picture and asked a Chinese TA to translate the next day. Apparently, my water was to be shut off today from 8am to 5pm, but it would come back on for a bit during the lunch hour from 11am to 1pm (since Chinese come home for lunch).

I asked a Chinese student why the water would be shut off and she said because we use too much water. I also asked a foreigner that has been here for five years why it would be shut off and she said it was because they are doing construction somewhere, they need to cut a pipe to add a new line and there aren't frequent shut off valves like we have in the US. Both of these sound like likely explanations.

The VP from my school texted us all late last night to tell us the water would be out in the whole city during this time, so I was expecting today to be an exceptionally smelly day city wide with no flushing toilets anywhere, eek. Turned out the toilets still flushed, thank god, but sinks did not work. Not like the Chinese wash their hands anyway.

guahsa

I went with some friends the other day to get massages and I tried guasha for the first time! Guasha involves putting oil on your back and using an animal's horn (still in the shape of a horn, not carved into any other form) to essentially scratch your back. Hard. It's supposed to be relaxing and they're supposed to especially go after knots and kinks.

And apparently sometimes they scratch a pattern into your back!

I expected this to be scabs the next day, but a full 24 hours later these are just bruises.

I wasn't necessarily a big fan of this, I don't think I'd do it again. I was talking about it with a student of mine afterwards, and she thinks the guy did it too hard. She does it at home to/with her family and they do it very lightly to relax and help open up the energy flow in your body.

My friends and I were actually supposed to go to the bath house instead of the massage parlor the night I did this, but that plan fell through. A bunch of the foreign (and Chinese) guys I hang out with like the bath houses here, but the girls don't so much, and none of them want to go with a girl they know because they feel weird about being naked with people they know. This kind of sucks because, going with the guys, I will basically just be hanging out by myself for a lot of it. Also, having never been to a bath house here, I will have to navigate for the first time on my own. I don't see the minimal Chinese I have in my arsenal being particularly helpful in that situation (I won't be ordering food, giving directions, or introducing myself...)!

The bath houses here are different from Korea. The girl's sides don't have pools and there seems to be a lot more coed spaces (where you wear pajamas). Hopefully next week I'll get to check one out.

guns & crime

Many of the high school aged males I've met ask me about guns in the US. They love the fact that we can carry them there and those that are leaving China ask if they can buy one where they are going.

In China, civilians cannot own guns. One of my students told me it's because they're too violent. I told him I think the US is much worse. Then he told me if he had a gun here he would use it to go to a store and steal money. Awesome; this is their future.

Really though, I do feel it is much safer in China than the US (and not just for the lack of guns). I never worry about violent crimes, theft or anything. Maybe part of that is because I am reached by exactly zero local news ever, but still I know a lot of foreigners here and not a single one has been the victim of a crime committed by a Chinese person (other than overcharging).

When I was in Beijing a while back with my friend and his sister, she mentioned something about being mindful of my purse, and in my head I was just thought, "You're such a tourist; no Chinese is going to steal anything from right off my body." Granted I had many other reasons for thinking she wasn't really assimilating into the culture, but even after a short time here I had formed this opinion.

Chinese honesty

Last week, one of my Oil 2 students told me he met a Chinese friend of mine taking a test earlier that day. He said the guy knew the other foreigners as well and it sounded like we were quite good friends. The options of people this could have been were pretty slim, so I figured out who it was very quickly, and was immediately confused as to why this person was taking a test.

My student took it to advance in his job. My friend is technically unemployed, but sometimes does work for his parent's business. He has a masters degree from the UK, is not currently looking for a job and lives at home. I could not for the life of me figure out how the test would benefit him. I expressed as much to my student, and he said they were kind of cheating. He and my friend were put into a secret room to take the test and left alone with their answer sheets. Someone returned later to collect the answers.

This still didn't explain to me why my friend would need to take this test to cheat on anyway. And my student is quite smart so I didn't see him needing to cheat from my friend either. When I asked my friend, he didn't want to tell me or explain at all and said that he wasn't proud of it (so naturally I had to out him on my blog, sorry!).

Apparently, someone with some kind of government connections had paid him to take the test for them. Everyone that takes this test has a picture attached to their registration form. Whomever paid my friend to take the test knew someone that could usher my friend into a private office to take it instead of in the large room with the list/photo check in.

If he was so ashamed, I wasn't sure why he did it to begin with, but I only pushed for so many details.

Today, I returned to school after a break to have the receptionist immediately tell me to talk to a Chinese girl standing at the counter. She didn't tell me what to talk about and seemed quite frantic, but I had a class to prepare for. I asked the girl a few questions and gathered that she was a junior in high school and tomorrow had an interview with a private language school that she wished to attend. I told her and the receptionist that I had to go but they would have to rearrange my afternoon a bit if they wanted to me to spend time preparing her for the interview.

The situation seemed a little weird, the girl wanting to practice the day before an interview and telling me no to "practice" but yes to "prepare" (I assumed practice was just a new word). Turns out they wanted me to get the girl's life story down this afternoon so I could just pretend to be her and do the interview myself tomorrow. I have no clue if it was her idea or my school's.

By the time I figured this out, the girl was gone, but I told school admin it was a terrible idea and I wouldn't do it. They found a Chinese teacher to do it instead.

random pix: logo crossover

These logo similarities have been nagging me since I came over, finally remembered to look them up and post!

USA: Boys & Girls Clubs of America     CHINA: China Mobile

 

USA: Tori Burch     CHINA: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China

 

Crack Den parking

More on Chinese being crappy drivers... a while ago, a friend of mine drove over to The Crack Den to visit me. We went out to his car a short while later to find that he had been parked in. He and like 20 other cars. There are no really set parking spaces with lines and such anywhere, it's just kind of a free for all. I like to think usually people have the common sense not to park in a whole bunch of other people, but maybe not.

So about fitting through that space directly ahead...

We were meeting a bunch of friends for dinner, so we needed to get out of there ASAP. There's not really much you can do in that situation though, there are hundreds of apartments that car could have belonged to. The Chinese solution to this situation was to lay on the horn. For like five minutes. In hopes that the questionable parker would come out to move their car.

That didn't work, but it did draw quite the town hall meeting. My friend got out to inspect the car (like the owner's name was going to be written on it or something), and he kicked the tires, which made me laugh. In my head I'm thinking, "Silly passive aggressive Chinese. You tell that car who's boss!" To my surprise though, most everyone in the little town hall group kicked the car as well. Apparently they were trying to set off the car alarm, to further bother all the neighbors, in case the honking wasn't enough.

Big news at The Crack Den!

The town hall went in the nearby corner shop to see if anyone knew whose car it was, they went to the security gate to see if the guards knew whose car it was, five guards came to kick the car also, they asked everyone that walked by whose car it was. In the end we took a cab.

When I was visiting my friend in Korea, she was telling me about similar situations there, except that in Korea, everyone has their phone number on their dashboard somewhere, so if they are in your way, you can just call them to come move their car.

Last week, my same Chinese friend that got blocked in parked near Crack Den 2.0 in what should have been a parallel parking spot, but he left his car jack knifing out into the throughway. There was completely enough room to fix it, but he insisted that the car was fine.

When he went out to get his car later someone had hit him. lol

efficiency & discrimination

Obviously employment is a little bit different in China due to the whole socialism/communism thing. In a tutoring session today with my student that works as a translator in the oil company, she mentioned that her company is not nearly as efficient as it could be, because they are required to employ so many people. Apparently her company owns the rights to some oil rich land in the middle east, and their middle eastern counterparts are often wondering why they have so many people working in their oil fields.

With so many people in China, it can be very difficult to find a job, even with government mandates for numbers of employees and such. This is why the Chinese are so concerned with getting good grades to get into a prestigious university so their diploma will carry weight with companies when they graduate and they can get a good job.

I'd love to know more about hiring and workplace discrimination here. Chinese resumes must include some things that would just be asking for a lawsuit in the States. You have to have your age, date of birth, gender, marital status, nationality and a picture on your resume.

damn liberals

I was having a conversation with a student the other day about marriage, and I always like to bring up the ideas of bisexuality and homosexuality to see people's reactions. Naturally, these concepts are generally frowned upon in China, but the bigger the city, the more acceptable or the more likely you are to find bi or homosexuals. This particular student told me she thinks most people are bisexual, which I found interesting. Especially since she was born and raised in Songyuan, which is a pretty small city.

One thing I struggle with here is how much of my ultra socially liberal ideology to pass off as normal American thinking. I sometimes have a hard time judging what the general population's feelings are on a lot of issues because I am so liberal, as are most of my friends. I usually present something leaning in a more liberal direction but do try to say something to the effect of, "This is how I feel about this, but I am sure it's just like China in that bigger cities are more open minded and socially progressive than smaller ones, but you can find people that believe in the extremes on either side of an issue."

the family unit

In China, when a man proposes to a woman, the couple is not officially engaged until after they have an engagement party. They don't usually have engagement rings, and they don't usually wear their wedding rings once they marry. There is no way to tell if someone is married just by looking at them.

Divorce is not very common of course, and is pretty severely frowned upon, as is having a child out of wedlock. Chinese immediate families sometimes function almost as if they are not a whole unit though. It is not uncommon for one parent, or even the child, to live in a different city from the rest of the family. Usually this is related to job availability. One parent will go where the good job is, while the other will remain at home with the child. The whole family unit doesn't move because, as a general rule, Chinese do not like change. So, one parent basically acts as a single parent. I have one student that hasn't lived in the same city as her father for ten years.

Family names work a little differently here too. When a couple gets married, the woman does not drop her family name and take her husband's, her name remains the same. The children will take his family name, and possibly hers as well.

Most westerners are also familiar with the one child policy and the fact that Chinese (used to) favor male children. Now they can have more children, they just pay a tax for the second child. Female children are also coming more into favor because apparently you need females to continue a population. Who knew?

birthday treat

It was one of my coworkers birthdays last night, so a big group of us, Chinese and foreign alike, went out for dinner. We had a great time! And I learned that in Chinese and Filipino culture, on your birthday you treat your friends and pay for everything. It felt super weird to watch a coworker pay for 15 of us (eek) to go out to dinner for her birthday. Especially since she's not a good friend; she doesn't really come out much and tends to just hang out with her boyfriend. I felt bad.

seizure sign

This cracks me up every time I see it. I absolutely love it.