another adventure

The Chinese American teacher from my school in Songyuan recently moved to Nankai, another district of Tianjin City. My last tutoring student cancelled Tuesday night, so with the free evening I headed to Nankai to visit my friend. I hopped the 30 minute lightrail by myself and actually made it there, my first successful solo public transit trip (last time I tried my train got cancelled, the clerk didn't tell me and sold me a ticket to a train the next day instead and my phone died so I couldn't call my TA once I figured it out)! My TA made me a little note with Chinese to show people if I needed help and I almost wanted to safety pin it to my jacket, like a child traveling alone. I ended up not needing it though, because the light rail has automated ticket machines with English and a scrolling sign with English in the cars. Yay for independence.

In Nankai, my friend and I had dinner at a crazy big restaurant that was actually three restaurants in one, a French place, a Russian place and a German place, each with its own floor. Nankai has a lot of little pockets that are heavily influenced by different cultures; they're called concession areas and are products of the war. Dinner turned out to be an overpriced, under-delivering bust but that's alright. I tried duck liver there, I'm not sure I'd say it competes with frog or shark fin soup on the crazy food scale though.

After dinner we wandered around Nankai a bit and headed to the expat bar right near the university where he teaches for cocktails and a rousing game of Battleship! My friend is not really a drinker, but we ended up staying up until 3am talking. He seems to have made it his mission to solve all the questions in my life and find me a profession that's going to make me happy. More on that and my motives for coming to China in a future post (how has that not come up yet?).

The next day we got up early and headed to the aquatic park. This was not a water park in the traditional American sense. It is more like a city park designed around water features. It's very large with a themed island for each season, a zoo, a Bonsai garden and an amusement park for children. Naturally it would be much more beautiful in summer, but it was still a cool place to visit. I don't think my friend could imagine how it would look otherwise, so he did not much appreciate it.

transient art in the park

Clearly, the park was very crowded. Also, to be fair, school was in session, so no kids.

After the park we headed to the Ancient Culture Street to explore. This turned out to be very cool. It's basically a street full of traditional Chinese shops and vendors. There's definitely a lot of commercial, touristy kitsch and crap, but there is a lot to look at and not all of it is completely fake. If you want a knock off purse though, this wouldn't be a bad place to look though.

While we were there, we stumbled upon the Queen of Heaven Temple. This was a small courtyard area full of little rooms to look into, each with some kind of deity or figure to pray or pay homage to. Each had a large incense pit in front.

Then it was time to head back to the university to grab lunch with a group of the foreign professors that meets every Wednesday. Turns out most of the other foreigners that teach with my friend at the university are elderly retirees and, oddly enough, Mormon. Two of them are even from Chandler, AZ. They all like to stay on campus and after talking to them for an hour and watching them in action at a restaurant in China I'm alright never seeing these people again. They're nice enough, but they don't go out and try new things, they don't try to follow Chinese customs at all and they seem to be pretty sheltered here. And they're perfectly ok with that.


After lunch we had just enough time to go check out the world's fourth largest Ferris wheel, and the only one built over a bridge! Kind of crazy to see cars driving right along next to you as you ride.

fun with food

I have no clue what either of these are!

This one you bite off chunks of, chew them and suck the juice out and then spit out whatever is left. You end up with something that has the ropey quality of celery, but is more like cardboard or wood (imagine that). The juice is sweet and tasty.

This one you apparently don't have to slice, the outside peels off easier than an orange and all in one piece. The clearish inside is kind of slimy and chewy. It's sour and has the consistency of a softer fruit snack. The greenish pit you spit out and don't eat.

...on to the other interesting offerings at the grocery store!

fortune cookies

The Chinese do not know what these are. I asked a class of mine in Songyuan about them and I had to show them pictures to explain and they had a bunch of questions about the fortunes. I have yet to see one. The Chinese don't really even eat dessert at all. Where on earth did we come up with this?!

It makes the Ben & Jerry's/Linsanity controversy even funnier. There is a guy that comes to my government class on Saturdays whose English name is Jeremy, after Jeremy Lin, so we are reading an article about it and having a debate this week. Stay posted for the final verdict!

teaching vs planning

This first few weeks in Tanggu has really been my first introduction to teaching, as I only taught maybe 14 hours the week prior in Songyuan. I have felt in Tanggu like I have been doing so much work, way more than I should be doing, outside of my teaching hours. The foreigners and the Chinese I know all agree with me as well, and I am finally getting a handle on it and making a more reasonable balance for myself.

All foreigners' contracts are structured based on so many teaching hours per month, lesson planning and office hours are expected and we are compensated as such, but they are not necessarily tracked and do not count toward our teaching hours. When you tutor or teach a class that isn't working from a book, teaching requires a lot more work outside of your teaching hours to prepare, as you are essentially creating all course materials yourself. This has been my struggle; I am not as good at coming up with things in class off the cuff and I don't want to be a boring teacher, so I feel the need to prepare a lot before class. A lot of foreign teachers don't do this.

For the two middle schoolers I am tutoring I am creating their material as we go. We don't work on their work from English class, as they are both really good with the language and ahead of their class. We aren't working from another book, and we aren't really working towards anything. One wants to take the SATs, but she's too young for a lot of the practice materials out there.

The labor union guy I am working with wants to be able to give a speech in English by the end of the year and has a 52 lesson course we are working through, which helps. He studies ahead of each class and learns very quickly though, so we burn through the lessons in no time. The lessons also need to be supplemented quite a bit to teach a well rounded use of the language.

The government class I teach has 40 people registered and between five and ten people show up each class, all with vastly different English levels. The class is theoretically supposed to be business English, and there is a sort of book for it, but no one in the class uses English for their jobs (which are all in different bureaus of the government by the way) and all they want to do is practice speaking. When I met with the people that contracted us to teach the class, their only measure of success was how many people return week after week. Given all that, I am not using the book, so I am creating all my own material for them as well. I teach them in three hour blocks at a time, which can be very long, and some people come every class, some only come on Fridays and some only come on Saturdays, so I have to remember who I am catering to each class.

Oof.

But like I said, I am keeping a better balance for myself since my friend was in town all last week. I am also finding things to do around the city, even if my TA doesn't want to go, and hopefully this week I will meet some new people too. Regardless, my plan is still to return to Songyuan soon and get back to my life and friends there :)

random pix: farting panda, Oyster sauce rape & serial crushing

I have no idea what this is all about and I don't care. I love it.

See? Mustaches have cross cultural appeal!

 

And so does the Hulk? A lot of people with scooters have these gloves on them, and they make tons of sense when it's so cold out, but they still crack me up every time I see them!

Seriously people?

 

I'm sorry, OYSTER SAUCE RAPE?!? Wtf?

Maybe just a tad over dramatic?

slacking excuse #3: the Forbidden City

On Thursday my friend and I went to the Forbidden City, in Beijing!

We took one of these crazy cart things to get there. It has to be the most dangerous vehicle I've ever been on/in. It is basically a motorbike with a cart built on it.

Finally, something that looks like traditional Chinese. It was very impressive, you walk straight through courtyard after courtyard and the farther in you get, the more the walls close in towards the center and the more interesting it gets to look at.

Chinese army drilling in the yard

 

lots of chairs on display

 

 

 

If Chinese girls can do it in pictures, so can I.

 

slacking excuse #2: frog, the American bar & downtown Tanggu

Tuesday night after 798 and then my tutoring sessions, my friend and I grabbed my TA and went out for dinner and drinks right around our apartment. At the restaurant we ordered the usual excessive assortment of dishes, including frog (it is my goal to eat as many non-Western foods as I can). The Chinese tend to leave bones in their food when they cook it though and you just have to beware when you eat. Most of this had bones in it, the frog (body, not legs) included, and a lot of it was so small that getting the bones out was really difficult; it ended up being almost inedible.

frog with ginger

After that we went to the one American bar that I've seen in Tanggu; it has an American flag carved in wood over the door. We drank Guiness, played pool, drew on the walls and had a great time, even though there was nobody else there. We ended up staying out until bar time (which was 2am).

The next day, my friend and I tried to go to Beijing, and then to Tianjin, but neither train schedule worked out with my tutoring in the evening, so we ventured out to Tanggu proper. There were a lot of things to see there, tons of shopping and we went to an arcade, but I couldn't get over how dirty everywhere I've been in China is, and how insanely polluted the air in Tanggu is. Tanggu is part of TEDA (Tianjin Economic Development Area), so it is the most quickly developing industrial area in Tianjin province. All we kept saying walking around all day was that the air was going to kill us all.

"So... this is China..."

"So... this is a bull..."

"So... this is a shopping mall with a random killer whale on it..."

"...and this is one called I Love U..."