Shanghai adventure

I'm an Shanghai right now on holiday. A while back, a friend of mine that I hadn't seen since college (so in six ish years) hit me up on facebook saying he was coming here for a business trip and that I should come meet him. He was coming for 20 days or something, so I said right on, arranged a five day holiday and headed on over.

This friend got a little bizarre after college; he kind of fell off the face of the planet. He stopped returning calls from anyone from high school or college and we never heard much from him again. Still a great guy, but it was a little weird that he just disappeared.

Anywho, since my friend was here for work and obviously had a hotel arranged and everything, I just assumed I was going to stay with him while I was in town. I emailed telling him as much the day before I came here and he asked me to get my own room somewhere instead. Didn't really give a reason, aside from calling his boss an expletive, but she's not here so, so I'm just assuming he doesn't want to be woken up by my crazy self partying. My bad for not asking first though. I told him that it's a national holiday in China this weekend and getting my own room on such short notice could be a little difficult without paying an arm and a leg, but I'd work on it.

He also told me he basically didn't have any time to hang out with me at all. He's working 8am to god knows when at night every night. So I arrived on Thursday and was essentially alone on holiday in Shanghai with nowhere to stay, lol.

I ended up crashing with him the first two nights I was here, and the last three I've booked rooms in three different hostels. I've only stayed in hostels once before in Europe, but I had great experiences with all of them and they're so cheap.

I picked ones in slightly different areas of the city, better for exploring and such. I booked all shared accommodations, thinking I would meet people to potentially hang out with for a bit. Not so much. Right now I'm sitting in the first hostel, which is kind of a fail on multiple fronts. I have a six person shared room all to myself. The place is super cute from the outside and in what I would call authentic Chinese area, but my room is on the first floor and it feels damp. I'm a little weird about bathrooms also and this one is kind of icky. They didn't give me a towel either, sooooo I'm breaking back into my friend's hotel for a shower in the morning.

My first night here, I chatted with my friend for about a half hour and then we both crashed, I was tired and he had to work in the morning. The next day I just went wandering around the French concession area. I absolutely love it. Shanghai is definitely my favorite city in China so far. There is so much to look at!

Shanghai had me once I saw the parks and green things :)

 I met an Aussie guy while I was having lunch yesterday, and we explored for the rest of the day and went to a club at night. Today, I basically was lazy and recovering all day until late afternoon when I got my act together, came over to my hostel and then wandered around the concession area some more.

I'm going to make it an early night tonight and hopefully go check out some more cool stuff tomorrow. This hostel is pretty depressing, so I'm getting out of here asap in the morning. I've never really traveled alone before, and it can definitely get lonely, so lonely AND depressing is not something I need!

super legit piercing place

I have two anchors on the back of my neck that I naturally cannot see. Sometimes they catch on things like shirts, scarves, etc. and get a little red and irritated, but it's not big deal. If I am getting sick, one of them will usually get red and irritated. It's been cold since I've been here, so I've been wearing a lot of scarves and they haven't been especially happy with me, but all I need to do to make them better put warm salt water compresses on them for a while. Different piercers in the States will tell you different things (like maybe to use alcohol or something instead), but the ones I trust the most subscribe to this so I do too.

Anywho, the one on my right side of my neck has been especially sore feeling recently. I could feel something funky if I touched it, but I thought it was just crusted puss or something, so I had a friend clean it out. The friend did, but failed to mention that the thing was half ripped out of my neck. I don't know if he thought it was normal or what, but it didn't look like the other one at all, so if it were me, logically I would think something was up with one of them... but maybe that's just me.

Yesterday one of my students tried to explain to me that something was wrong, so she took a picture and showed me. I asked her how long it had been like that and she said maybe a week; she thought I knew. No bueno.

When an anchor is half out, you still have to go see a piercer to pull it all the way out; it's not an easy thing to do (or maybe I'm just a wuss). I've accidentally pulled one half out before. My piercer pulled it the rest of the way out, I let it heal for a month and then she redid it for me. That was my plan here as well.

There are a couple problems with this though. Chinese people don't really get tattoos and piercings. China is also very dirty. On top of that, Songyuan is pretty darn small, so I was a little concerned with A.) finding a clean piercing shop B.) finding a clean shop that had some experience with anchors C.) finding a piercing shop period.

I asked a Chinese friend of mine for help and he did some research. He called a cosmetic surgery place (not sure why) and they recommended he take me to a hospital. He's a big worrier too, so that was his plan, but I wasn't down with that. He did also find one tattoo/piercing shop that he checked out, but he was concerned with the cleanliness, the fact that the shop owner was smoking in the shop, etc. It still sounded like a better option to me, so we took another Chinese friend of mine and went there first.

The shop was unfortunately closed when we got there, so my friend called the guy, who had apparently spaced the fact that we were coming. We had to go pick him up so he could check me out. He looked at my neck in the car and told me that my piercing was infected from the water. That didn't exactly instill confidence in me, seeing as how it was clearly ripped halfway out, but I still didn't have any other options. I showed him my others to prove that it wasn't the water. He said if we took him back to his shop he'd pull it out for me.

The shop was pretty standard, if only not quite as clean as the States. He cleaned both of my anchors and took the jacked up one out. He seemed pretty worried that I was going to be in pain because I'm a girl, which made me laugh. Both of my friends were Chinese and pretty freaked out by the whole thing too. After the piercer took the one out he said maybe he could try to put it back in right away. It sounded like he had never put an anchor in someone before, soooooo I declined.

He seemed pretty adamant about me not putting water on it to heal though (what is WITH the Chinese and water?!) and made my friend go buy me iodine to clean it with. He told me not to wash it for like three days. About that though... not listening to him. Warm salt water has always worked for me in the past, so I'm sticking with that. I go to Hong Kong in about a month, so I figure they probably have more experience with piercings there so I can give it a month to heal get it redone then.

cold, bed after baby, families & planning

The Chinese are very averse to cold and they think of sickness, aches and pains and any other physical ailments as cold being in their bodies. For example, when I had cupping done, the woman told me it was to remove the cold wind, and the places where I bruised more heavily were where I had more cold.

This is why they don't drink cold beverages, they don't think you should touch cold things, they never have skin showing until it is ungodly hot, etc. If you are getting sick, they think you need to drink something hot and maybe sit in a sauna to drive out the cold.

A student of mine that I would consider to be very modern and forward/western thinking told me that she gave birth to her daughter in August, so she thought it was sometimes too hot to wear socks. She said she got very sick after that and now her feet bother her regularly as a result of her letting the cold get in them.

Chinese believe that a woman cannot get out of bed after giving birth, she must rest, take care of her baby and keep the cold away since she is weak at that time. Traditionally, her mother in law must come take care of her and she is expressly forbidden to leave the house. That same student said she knows western women are up and about immediately after child birth, but that our bodies must be different. Maybe after all these years of following the practice of staying in bed for a month, it's true and Chinese women's bodies have evolved a little differently, who knows, but somehow I doubt it they could be that different.

Also, apparently abortions are very easy to get in China, which makes sense since everyone is only supposed to have only one child. They don't get a whole lot of sexual/family planning education in school though; I can't remember if I've mentioned it or not before, but I had a 12 year old female tutoring student in Tianjin who didn't know what a period, tampons or pads were, not even the Chinese words. Poor girl is in for an unfortunately surprise, I felt bad for her. I couldn't explain it to her though, I definitely have that "it's not my place" idea ingrained in me. Someone else told me that their teacher gave her class all a book about sex and bodies and such in high school one day and told them all to read it alone.

If Chinese want to have more than one child, I found out they can get a permit and then they don't need to pay the tax. They must go through their employer to get one (can you say awkward conversation? except not, since it's normal here, but it sounds awkward for me). If they have one without a permit, their employer must pay a tax in addition to them, because it means the employer is not in charge of their employees and not taking adequate measures for family planning. They must sign an agreement every year with their employer saying they won't have more than one child. And the government gives them all money for having only one.

Family relationships are also a lot more complicated than I first thought. Chinese call everyone their age "brother" or "sister," and I assumed it was because they don't actually have brothers or sisters. Actually, in the Chinese language, there is a different word for the relationship between every single family member, except for peers (i.e. cousins). So, there is a different word for say your relationship to your mom's older sister versus her younger sister or your dad's sister. I'm not sure why the relationships to those older and younger than you are more specific than those with the family members in your age bracket. Very complicated and interesting though!

nice little Sunday afternoon

Yesterday I went to my coffee shop after work to write, and as I was sitting down an older Chinese woman came up to me and introduced herself in very good English. She sat down with me to chat for a bit. The area right in front of the coffee shop is a sort of transportation hub for buses (like five routes begin there), and she had been waiting for a bus when she saw me walk by and decided to follow me in to talk to me.

She asked me if I had plans for the afternoon, and being that I just had very loose plans to grab dinner and drinks a few hours down the road with some of the other foreigners, I said not really. She asked if I would mind if her college aged niece, who is studying English translation, came to join us and chat with me. I said of course not, so she called her niece, who invited us over to her home instead.

We walked over to her sister's apartment where her niece stays, and her niece and I ate and drank tea and talked for a few hours. Her sister came home, and then her sister's husband came home and the three of the older adults cooked dinner. No one actually asked me to stay for dinner, they just assumed I would.

The meal was phenomenal, we had a few different kinds of fish, pork, goose, leeks and eggs, some kind of salad, homemade sangria aaaaaand (drumroll please) crocodile! I tried it and the woman's niece freaked out, she had never tried before either, even though her parents make it often enough (needless to say I talked her into it). It was crocodile "hands." The skin was still on, it had a thick layer of fat underneath it. It was pretty tasty, not a lot of meat, but the fat didn't have that icky, fatty, squishy texture.

After dinner, the niece invited me to try on traditional Chinese costumes that her mother had, so the four of us women basically played dress up and had a photo shoot for a few hours while we forced the woman's poor brother in law to take pictures. It was so random and awesome.

I was there for almost six hours and completely missed my friends. They were calling/texting the whole time, but I felt rude answering and honestly, there was no way I was leaving that scenario for anything. I can't make this stuff up!

time is $$$ (or not)

I'm a pretty laid back person, but sometimes when people (i.e. my school) don't have any respect for my time and think it has no value, it gets a little annoying.

A few days ago my VP was talking on the phone to my school's owner about the schedule, and in the middle of the office with all of us foreign teachers there she said, "We will just put a teacher's name there on the schedule; we don't pay them for classes on the schedule, just for what they teach, so if the student doesn't show up it doesn't matter." That definitely grated at me a bit. Like we have nothing better to do that wait around in the hopes that maybe a student will show up and we might work that day.

The whole value of time issue is also why many of us foreign teachers at my school are aggravated about the Happy Songyuan English Speaking Contest. I've pretty much removed myself from that situation, which is awesome. Earlier this week there was supposed to be a mandatory meeting for all teachers at 6pm regarding the contest. Administration didn't put it on the schedule, didn't verbally tell any of us about it and they just wrote it on the a large white board in the school the morning of. I had conflicting plans, so I didn't go. Nobody said anything to me about it either, which was nice.

I did miss some news apparently though, because when I got to school the next day, there was such a huge crowd out front I thought there was a fire or something. The contest round that day happened at our school, instead of elsewhere. Consequently, most of my classes for the day were cancelled, not that the school figured this out beforehand or anything (because that would make too much sense).

I left when they decided my morning classes were cancelled, but then one of my school admins called me to back school because he changed his mind. When I got back, the student he called me back to teach got into a fight with him because the student didn't want to have class. Meanwhile, I'm sitting around awkwardly watch them fight, getting caught in the middle and not working toward my teaching hours at all (until I did end up tutoring him that day). No bueno.