Some pictures of us

I realize we don't take enough pictures of ourselves in China, and maybe you want to see our familiar faces every once in awhile. We finally have friends who take pictures of us and send them to us.

So, here we are with our new Colombian friends, Sylvia and Felipe. We met them for some moon-gazing on the night of the Mid-Autumn festival, but by the time we got to the park, all the Chinese were already drunk and passed out on benches, so we went to a noodle shop for a late dinner, followed by a walk in the moonlight.

My students like to take pictures of me with their camera phones while I'm teaching, which is incredibly distracting. I told them I would pose for pictures after class if they would quit disrupting class. Here is a picture one of my students sent me from an after-class photo shoot. Her name is Jennifer too and she thinks that "we will be best friends." She kept insisting that we hold hands for the picture, but I kept insisting that I wanted to keep my hands firmly pressed on the podium.

Time Marches On

Well, believe it or not, this weekend marks our first full month in China. We still feel new, we still feel like we are on vacation, but many things that at first seemed so strange are beginning to seem normal. I hardly notice funny signs in bad English anymore; I've just come to expect them. We are still enjoying Chinese food, but are getting tired of the similar flavors. Maybe this is because we only know how to order about four dishes and eat two of them for lunch and two for dinner almost every day. Last night we caved and went to a Western-style restaurant (more like a Western theme restaurant) called Babela's Kitchen and ate spaghetti just to mix it up. It tasted Chinese, but it still hit the spot.

I am happy to report that Gina has returned to China. I went to pick her up from the airport on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which seemed appropriate. It will be nice to have her here. Last night we went to get side-by-side hairwash/massages. This is a Chinese luxury. For one to three dollars, you can get your hair lathered up into a beehive of shampoo for about ten minutes, followed by a face, neck, and arm massage. This is a cheap, relaxing evening activity here and the massage is full of unique Chinese techniques we've dubbed things like "the arm jumprope" and the "finger snap." We will make this a weekly occurance.

I have also just completed my first week of teaching. I have one graduate-level Modern American Literature class, four graduate-level "communicative English" classes and two freshman "oral English classes." The literature students are my favorites. They all love Jane Austen and I'm about to blow them away with a T.S. Eliot/Pound lecture followed by some Hemingway and Faulkner, eventually leaving them in the dust with Barthelme. I hope they enjoy the ride. The school is a business/finance school, so the graduate students are all studying economics or accounting or other financial majors I know nothing about. Their biggest goal is to get a job with an American or international company, so we do lots of lessons on resume writing and interviewing skills. They are all very smart, but their English is not so good and they only have one semester to work on it. I keep telling them I'm not a magician, but they seem to think I can transform them all into native speakers by January. The freshman I am babysitting for a colleague who had to return to the States. I only wanted to take them on for a few weeks, but I have gotten very attached to them already. They are so unlike American freshman. No drinking or sex or fraternities; just studying. They are from all over China and I am learning so much about every province. We are all new to Shanghai, so we spend a lot of time practicing English and talking about this "vibrant, international" city (they love that word, vibrant).

So, things were going pretty well for our first month until we recieved some bad news yesterday. One of our new Danish friends committed suicide Wednesday night, shortly after Peter's last conversation with him. This was really a blow. He was set to become one of our closest friends in China. Peter and I both instantly liked him. He was Peter's weight-lifting buddy and we had invited him to live with us while he waited for a room in the foreign students' dorm. As with any suicide, we are left with many, many questions. It's hard to imagine why someone would set off on an adventure like this, moving to Shanghai to start a new life, only to want to end it in a few weeks. We are very saddened by the loss of our friend, but clearly this is what he wanted.

Sorry to end on a downer, but life in Shanghai is not all funny signs and turtles in the hallway (they're still there, by the way). It's like life anywhere else, "full of ups and downs"--an idiom my students love. We press on. We are making many new friends and next week is a holiday, so we are excited to finally have the time to really explore Shanghai and the surrounding areas, expanding our world away from the university.

Moon Festival

Tomorrow is the Mid-Autumn Festival in China, also known as the Moon or Mooncake Festival. Trying to pin down the origins of this holiday has proved difficult. There are many legends, including one about the day when ten suns appeared in the sky and a skilled archer was hired to shoot down the nine extras. He was rewarded with an elixir that would bring him eternal life, but his wife stole the elixir and was banished to the moon. Or, in some versions, she is a good wife and swallows the elixir just as she is about to be killed by her husband's enemy and is so immortalized in the moon. There's also one about a bunny who jumps into a boiling pot, sacrificing himself to feed some starving monks, who reward his heroism by inviting him back to the Moon Palace to live forever as the Jade Bunny.

Anyway, strange roots aside, the Mid-Autumn Festival is today a time to celebrate the harvest. Traditional foods include round fruits like grapefruits, melons, and pomegranates. Of course, the Moon Cake is also served. These are a huge deal here, sold everywhere from Starbucks and Walmart to street vendors. They are very expensive and wrapped extravagantly. In fact, China is trying to cut down on the wasted packaging of Moon Cakes, marketing some in simple recyclable packages as "green Moon Cakes." I received some of the ridiculously packaged Moon Cakes as a gift from the dean of my department. They were in two huge boxes in a huge bag. Each box held five Moon Cakes nestled in a satin liner. Each Moon Cake lies in a small dish, wrapped in plastic, and wrapped by yet another box. A knife and chopsticks are included in each box. I guess harvest time is a time of gluttony. The cakes can best be compared to western-style fruitcakes. They are dense and oily and filled with red bean and other unidentifiable pastes.

The reason I am telling you about the Moon Cake Festival is that its most important function today is to reunite families and friends. The roundness of the moon symbolizes the wholeness of families (among other things including fertility, which is why September/October is the most popular time to get married in China). Most Chinese try to be with their families for this holiday, but if they can't, they gaze at the full moon--the brightest of the year--and think about their loved ones. Which, if it's actually clear tomorrow night, is what we'll be doing. There are lots of nighttime activities and celebrations. We'll take a walk and hopefully it won't be raining (there's a lovely Chinese saying: "The Moon in the home sky always shines brightest," which I imagine, given the air quality in Shanghai, will be true for both me and Peter, having looked at the forecasts for Spokane and Boise). We'll spend several minutes unwrapping a Moon Cake, cut it into diagonal squares and sink our teeth into its pasty, oily density and think of the brightness and excess of our American home.

I leave you with what is printed on each and every one of our Moon Cakes:

Tasting the Delicious Food

Just Like Tasting the Wonderful

Life of Yours

3 Images from Sunday

Bubbles: Poodle: Dumplings:

As seen on TV

All is well in China on a Saturday afternoon. We went to a flat-warming party for some of Peter's Danish classmates. We were the only Americans there but everyone was speaking English. Very convenient for us. It's the international party language. There we were with Danes, Belgians, Frenchies, Chileans, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, and Chinese and they were all speaking our language. Sitting around drinking beer and listening to music seems to be an international past time as well. This is the second party we have been to and it seems like all the ex-pats need to get together once a week and just speak English and share frustrating Chinese experiences. Now we are ready to tackle another Chinese week, battling the unfamiliar. For instance, what's on TV right now...

Typhoon Wipha (Part 2 of 2)

Well, China was right, there really wasn't any news about the typhoon. At least not in Shanghai. It missed us by a long shot and it didn't rain as much yesterday as it did the day before when the storm was out over Taiwan. All is well. Our coffee was delivered. We found coffee filters and we spent the afternoon indoors drinking inky cups of espresso watching the rain. We might as well have been in Seattle.

Here's a picture of Peter riding home from school in the storm. We have these awesome Chinese ponchos that clip onto our bikes, so everything in our baskets stays dry. Very convenient. Too bad people in Seattle are too cool to wear something like this. They would have come in so handy. Maybe if Mountain Hardware started making them out of a breathable, waterproof microfiber and charged $250 for them, they would catch on.

Typhoon Wipha (Part 1 of ?)

So, yesterday Peter and I were on an aggressive hunt for coffee filters all over town. Coffee has been a constant struggle and we sometimes chew coffee flavored gum or go to Walmart where they are sampling instant Nescafe just to get a fix. We were spending twice as much money at Starbucks as we were on food each day, so we knew we had to change our ways. We spent some of our "home improvement" budget on a coffee pot and ordered a shipment of Yunan (not Yuban)--local Chinese arabica coffee with free delivery and 50% off new orders--so all we needed were coffee filters. All the coffee in the grocery store here is instant, so of course no one understands the need for coffee filters. We went so far to as place a triangle-folded piece of paper into the coffee pot at the store to indicate that we wanted to find such useful origami elsewhere in the store, but the message did not translate.

This was a two hour mission. Meanwhile it was raining. Hard. And as we rode our bikes across town from one store to another, the wind was blowing us off the road and the streets were filling with water. I knew it could rain here, but this was sensational. We were laughing, enjoying the shower and the silliness of us braving this sort of weather for coffee filters. I said, "I haven't seen rain like this since Hurricane Ivan came through Tuscaloosa." It was quite the downpour.

When we got home, I had an e-mail from the dean of international students at my school. It went like this: "A typhoon is attacking Shanghai. Please stay inside and close all windows and doors." "Oh," Peter and I said to each other, "that makes sense." But we still hadn't found our coffee filters, so we went to Walmart and found them boarding up the windows and sandbagging the neighborhoods nearby. But inside, everyone was calm and we searched the store over for coffee filters, picking up some water and beer and other staples just in case we were "attacked" by a typhoon. We even sampled some milky Nescafe to hold us over.

Wipha was all over the American news, but there was nothing about it here. The local weather report said it was raining. Yes, it was. About 10 inches worth. Today, it is dry. The air is thick like a blanket and the wind is picking up. We have no idea what to expect from this storm if it really is coming toward Shanghai. But so far, all is well. We have lots of Reeb and 9 seasons of Seinfeld and we're on the fourth floor. (Come to think of it the turtles do seem a bit agitated today...perhaps they can predict the weather).

Apartment 401: Home Sweet Home

Some images of our new apartment including the turtles that the neighbors keep in the stairwell (whether they are pets or food remains to be seen...) and the dead bonzai in the guestroom windowsill.

Finding an apartment

I will quickly walk through the standard procedure of finding an apartment to rent in one of the world's largest cities:

1. Decide which part of this massive city you want to live in. We wanted to be within a ten-minute bike ride of both of our schools and close to Grant and Gina, so that narrowed it down.

2. Decide on a neighborhood. A "neighborhood" in Shanghai is what we would call an apartment complex in the States. Of course everything here is an apartment; there aren't really any single-occupant dwellings. Neighborhoods range in size and quality. Almost all are gated with full-time guards. Some have small convenience stores or fruit stands or street food vendors inside. We wanted to live in a "more Chinese" neighborhood--one where our neighbors would be sitting around in their jammies playing mahjong all day and weird Chinese underwear would be hanging to dry from every balcony like welcome signs.

3. Decide on your desired lay-out. This is primarily a question of how many bedrooms you want. We were shooting for two, so that we could have guests. The one-bedroom apartment is rare here. They go from studios to two-bedroom, with usually a big step-up in square footage.

4. Find the nearest realtor. There's one on almost every block in a small, dirty office with a landline, a cell phone, and a water dispensor.

5. Tell the realtor what you're looking for. This is where we needed Grant. He explained what we were looking for in what neighborhood and the realtor started making phone calls. Each apartment is owned by a different landlord, so the realtor goes through his list to make an appointment for a viewing. If he finds a landlord at home (or sometimes the current tenants are home and you just barge in on them eating dinner or whatever), you head on over to take a look.

6. Follow the realtor through the streets of Shanghai on your bike. The realtor will either be on a scooter or a bike himself, and off you go, running red lights and ringing your bell to keep up.

7. Be either delighted or mortified by the apartment you are viewing. We looked at about six apartments ranging from concrete cells with running water and one free-standing gas burner to stainless steel Ikea-makeovers. Prices have gone up steeply in the past six months, but everything we looked at was between 250 and 400 US dollars per month.

8. Decide on one you like and start bargaining. Rent is somewhat negotiable. The first offer is usually about 50 USD lower than the asking price. The more rent you pay upfront, the lower the monthly installments. So 6 months gets you a 5% discount, while paying a year can sometimes get 10 - 15% off.

9. Pay your deposit and plan to meet with the landlord in the apartment to ask for concessions. Sometimes the landlord will buy new furniture or remove the ugly furniture that's already in the apartment. Ours was not so generous, but he did agree to fix the leaky faucet, the air conditioners that didn't work, and replace the half of the bathroom door that was missing.

10. Pay the realtor for his trouble. The realtor gets 35% of your first month's rent. The realtor who ended up finding us our apartment was an eighteen-year-old kid, who was admittedly hung over and who I think probably went directly to a club with the 120 USD we paid him.

11. Move in. Our place came furnished with lots of built in storage, two beds, a desk, two TVs, a table with six chairs, and a small futon. Also we aquired four and a half pairs of shoes, some dirty government-issued bedding, a bottle of listerine, a panda-shaped bug zapper, and a rain poncho left behind by the previous tenant. We paid some cleaners to come spend a day scrubbing the place spotless, bought a couch and some pots and pans off craigslist, hauled an extra desk and mattress pad from Grant's on the back of our bikes, and here we are.

Sex, Money, Power

Everyone knows the real reason we moved to Shanghai--or at least the real reason I convinced Peter to move with me to this great Panda of a country--is for the SMP skatepark. The SMP skatepark is the largest in the world and no one really knows why it's here. It's in a new part of town called "New Jianwan Town" and according to the billboards the new development is a "Eeological [sic] Dream of New Shanghai." The skatepark is about a twenty minute bike ride from where we live, but Shanghai sort of ends about five minutes into the ride. After that, the road widens and is immaculately landscaped with mature trees and a rubber jogging trail, but there is literally nothing out there. Except for billboards touting the future glories of New Jianwan Town. And then, dreamily, there it is. Over 13,700 square meters of fun. And it's a ghost town. The skatepark is literally the only thing concrete about Shanghai's new dream. We went yesterday. Peter had the place to himself, which is like taking your T-ball kid to play catch at Wrigley Field. It was dreamy alright, but like everything in China that was once shiny and new (last year), the skatepark is already falling apart. The bowls were full of cigarette butts and coke bottles, weeds were growing tall between the seats in the stands, and the ramps were already rusty and buckling. Black dust coated everything. Eventually some workers appeared and started hand-mixing concrete to patch some cracks and also two other skaters showed up who turned out to be professionals from Australia. One guy, Renton Millar, is on the Billabong team and he told us that he had helped design the vert ramp. Peter borrowed a broom from the workers and they swept out the ramp so Renton could show us how easy it was to drop-in. It was a terrifying view from the top and he wasn't bothering himself with doing too many tricks (he showed us the bloodstain from where he smashed his head in last time he was in Shanghai). No one knows why the world's largest skatepark was built an hour outside of one of the world's largest cities, where virtually no one skates. No one knows who paid for its concrete mass or its locally-quarried granite coping. As far as we can tell, it's only purpose is to make Peter feel like a badass, skating the vert ramp with nationally ranked skaters when he's not in class.

Relations

This is my new bike. It's affectionately called the "Relation." I did not bestow it with this name. It actually came with it, but I really coudln't have named it more appropriately myself. Peter's bike is called "Touching." The Chinese must really love their bikes. We just bought ours today and I can tell we will both have very special--dare I say intimate--relationships with our Chinese bicycles.

Reverse Culture Shock

Yesterday I had a meeting with the other new English teachers at my university. We met at the apartment of a returning teacher in the French Concession of Shanghai. Shanghai used to be a colonized city with several districts owned by various European countries. The French Concession is a popular district for ex-pats and being there is not unlike being in America. So after five days of not seeing another meiguoren (American—literally “person from a beautiful country”) and struggling to get a clean meal from street vendors, suddenly there were English and whities everywhere. An apartment in the French Concession can run you US$9,000 a month as opposed to the $150 we plan on spending. We went to lunch at a swanky French deli where my ham and brie sandwich, while very delicious, cost me $7—more than we spent on a week’s worth of groceries the night before. Rather than feeling comfortable and at home in this part of town home to so many foreigners, I felt quite out of place. Here I am trying to have an authentic Chinese experience, struggling with the language and eating mystery meat wrapped in rice buns and calling them hamburgers, while all these other Americans and Europeans who work for Starbucks and IBM and Microsoft are living like kings with all the comforts of home. I guess this is turning into a rant. On the bright side, my Illy espresso that I paid $2 for tasted just like heaven.

And on the third day we went to Starbucks

We were up at 3:30 in the morning again and figured we would be unable to combat the jetlag without a little coffee. We waited the seven hours until the stores started opening and rode our bikes to Starbucks. I don’t know that I have the words to describe how good our tall drips tasted. Drip coffee is about the same price per cup as in Seattle, but whole beans cost about $20 a pound, and that’s not for fair trade, organic, free range coffee either, which is what we’re used to paying through the nose for. I know we should probably switch to tea, but we have been dealing very well with every other aspect of culture shock. Allow us just this one thing.

Citizens of the World

Well, Peter and I and our 250 pounds of luggage have arrived in Shanghai. We spent a lovely last North American day in Vancouver, Canada, toward the end of its summer. We enjoyed the sunshine and black squirrels of Stanley Park and our final North American meal was at a Ukrainian restaurant, which was the furthest thing from Asian food we could find. I can’t imagine we will be eating much borscht or piroghies in China. Vancouver was a nice introduction to living abroad and a nice transition to life in another country—just foreign enough to be exciting without being overwhelmingly unfamiliar. Of course that all changed when we touched down in Shanghai after our 12-hour flight (in-flight movie was Blades of Glory—Peter and I were laughing audibly while our Chinese co-passengers looked on in horror). With my basic Chinese (turn left, go straight, turn right) and a primitive map Gina made me, we made it to Grant’s apartment surprisingly with ease. We arrived at 5:00 in the evening and after adventuring to the grocery store to buy frozen dumplings and two large bottles of Reeb (Shanghai’s own brew…”beer” spelled backwards if you didn’t catch that). We were in bed by 8:00. Wide awake at 3:00 the next morning, we watched Chinese television, which mostly consists of period-piece soap operas and infomercials for body augmentation pills. There is one English station, which is presented in “Special English,” a simplified version of the language for non-native speakers that consists of simple declarative sentences and monosyllabic vocabulary. Imagine the world news in the form of a Dick and Jane book. Eventually the rest of Shanghai began to awaken and we watched the elderly Chinese neighbors doing Tai Chi with swords in the apartment courtyard and listened to all the men of the neighborhood coughing up their first phlegm of the day. We spent the day exploring Fudan University where Peter starts taking classes in the English-taught master’s program in Chinese Politics and Diplomacy on Monday. The highlight of the day was paying his tuition in cash. After waiting for almost two hours at the bank, we went back to the school with a huge wad of cash. The largest denomination of Chinese money is a 100 yuan note, which is a little over twelve dollars. We had a stack of several hundred bills and stood in line with dozens of other students paying with similar stacks. I’d only seen so much cash in gangster movies. After a long day of culture shock, we bought The Simpsons Movie DVD for two dollars and enjoyed American satire chased down by delicious Reeb.