Feastival

Today is, of course, the hardest day of the year for us to be away from our friends and family. Feastival--the most important holiday of the Roman calendar--is passing us uneventfully here in China. Somehow the thought of eating enchiladas until you throw up, wearing three completely different, elaborately-made costumes, and knocking on strangers' doors begging for candy (or toilet paper or ramen) seems just as foreign to the Chinese as putting raw meat into a shopping cart and eating golden retriever seems to us. We are trying to put together a celebration for this weekend with our international friends (hopefully even making enchiladas with the tortillas Bijou and Will sent...thanks, guys!), who I think will be game.

But for today, we keep all of you in our hearts. It is the best day of the year. I will introduce the traditions of Feastival to my students this afternoon, and as I ride through the streets of Shanghai with my asthma mask on I will at least pretend to be dressed up as a bird flu-paranoid Asian traveler. Wish you all were here or that we were there and that there would be dancing and wine and way too much food.

Incidentally, today is also the day Peter and I celebrate our anniversary. Seems like just yesterday a nineteen-year-old Incredible Hulk bench-pressed a twenty-year-old wonder woman into the air in the middle of a crowded room. Actually, it seems like a very long time ago. That was my first Feastival, back in the last millenium, and it has been a nonstop party ever since.

Eat, Drink, and Be Sweaty in Your Costumes!

Thanks, China

Well, we haven't even been here two months yet and I am officially an asthmatic. Living in the rapidly industrializing second world is taking its toll on me already. In some ways I feel like Morgan Spurlock, who intentionally ate as much McDonalds as he could to prove what he already knew: that the stuff is really bad for you. I guess I knew that the pollution was really bad in Shanghai, but I didn't think that seven weeks into my year here, I would have developed a new disease. Kind of like that scene in Supersize Me when he just starts throwing up. Suddenly I realized I really couldn't breathe. So, one day after my return from the top of a blue-sky mountain, I am using an inhaler to cope with the coal dust, diesel exhaust, cigarette smoke, chemical vapor, and mold spores that make up what we in Shanghai consider air. On the bright side, my visit to the doctor cost me thirteen cents and prescription drugs here are almost as cheap.

Huangshan

The saying goes something like this: If you climb all seven of China's famous mountains, you can skip the rest of the mountains in the world; and if you climb Huangshan you can skip the rest of China's mountains. This is according to our Norwegian friend, Jo, who is a bit of travel expert, having hitch-hiked across most of China last spring break. Jo called us the night before our friend Alicia from Seattle was supposed to arrive for a five-day visit on her way to Hong Kong to ask if we wanted to tackle Huangshan over a long weekend. We were so desperate to leave Shanghai that we told him to go ahead and book three train tickets, so when Alicia arrived we said, surprise, welcome to Shanghai, we're leaving for a mountain in the middle of China tomorrow night.

And so with two Norwegiens--Jo and Maurius, our dear Colombian friends--Sylvia and Filipe, and Alicia we headed to Anhui province on an overnight train. The train was fun, but our Chinese travel companions were up at 4:30 coughing up last night's nicotine, drinking tea, and talking in the ridiculously loud way that only the Chinese can. From the town of Huangshan, we took a one hour bus ride through tea farms to the base of the mountain, where a Mr. Hu suddenly appeared in our bus. Mr. Hu is one of those resourceful Chinese who know enough English to both exploit and help travelers. He seemed to know all the restaurant owners, hotel managers, and bus and taxi drivers on the mountain, not to mention the fact that he claimed to be related to President Hu. He hooked us up with the cheapest accommodation on the top of the mountain: a room behind the hotel worker's housing with seven bunks, no running water, and two outdoor squatties out back. We were roughing it and the room suited us just fine. Besides the rickety bunks and mildew-spotted sheets, the room was perfect with a concrete landing that served as the coolest patio with an incredible view of the surrouning peaks covered with the extraordinary colors of fall foliage.

Huangshan means Yellow Mountain, and all those famous Chinese landscape paintings make a lot of sense now that we've been there. The mountain is a series of naked granite peaks with maples and other deciduous trees draping their bases and bonzai-shaped umbrella pines clinging to the rocks. Huangshan is famous for its clinging mists and low clouds, but we had two days of full sun and crisp autumn air, which was incredibly refreshing coming from the smoggy humid air of muggy Shanghai. Our last day was shrouded in fog, which prevented us from seeing any vistas, but provided a very Chinese atmosphere of dense, sound-deadening air full of contemplation.

The highest peak in the park is just over six thousand feet, and you can walk all the way to the top up a flight of stairs that is several kilometers long. This is a strange way to explore nature and somehow walking up a never-ending set of stairs is much harder than walking up the side of a mountain the way we're used to. No switchbacks; just one foot after the other, plodding up and up at a hypnotizing pace. We took a cable car up to the top, then hiked all over for two days: to the East for sunrises and to the West for sunsets. We managed to sneak off the stairs for one adventurous hike up a valley, only to be caught by the guards when we popped back up a ravine on the wrong side of the fence. He asked what we were doing, and our Norweigen-accented translator told him we were hiking. The guard told us it was very dangerous to leave the trail and lined us up on a wall. We thought we were going to get a good scolding, but instead he seemed quite charmed and told us how strong we were and couldn't believe that girls could climb up the side of a mountain like that. He shook our hands and we walked along the paved path back to our room.

On our last day we decided to hike down to the bottom on foot the long way, which was a seven hour hike mostly down a giant flight of stairs, but which also included some surprisingly difficult steep climbs upward. It ended up being quite grueling, as even the men who climb up and down the mountain daily carrying up to 100 kilos of goods on their shoulders admit that going down is much harder than coming up. I guess I forgot to mention that all of the supplies for the resort on the top of the mountain are carried by stringy Chinese men who shlep their loads on bamboo sticks over their shoulders for ten dollars a day. It's hard to believe your eyes when one of these guys races past you up the steepest stairs you've ever seen carrying six or eight cases of beer or a broken refrigerator. When Maurius asked why they didn't use the cable car, they said that it would take away too many jobs. Of course.

Our legs were shaking when we got to the bottom and we had to cram ourselves into a minibus with our packs on our laps for a harrowing ride back to town. Our nervous Norweigen translator screamed in Chinese whenever our driver started to pass on a blind corner, "This thing that you are doing is not okay!" To calm our nerves we sang an original version of The Wheels on the Bus, with verses like "the people on the bus are scared to death, scared to death, scared to death..." and "driver of the bus goes ha ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha ha, whenever we start to scream." The driver said that he liked our singing very much and we kept coming up with more and more ridiculous verses.

With aspirin and beer nightcaps, we slept like rocks on the train on the way back to Shanghai and our legs were so sore we almost collapsed when we crawled out of our bunks this morning. It is a bit disappointing to be back in the big city after such a lovely vacation. It's nice to know that most of China is stunning and that it is just Shanghai that's ugly and noisy and unpleasant. We are anxious to see more of China--even though we officially don't have to go to any of the other mountains in the country. And we continue to feel blessed by our incredible foreign friends who are tackling this other-worldly country with us week by week. I must say we are quite happy with our life here today.

Blog on Vacation

It's been a busy week with our first out-of-town guest visiting and now we are headed on a long weekend trip to Yellow Mountain--a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 10 hours from here. We are excited to get out of Shanghai and there will be lots of catching up to do when we get back. In the meantime, all is well in China. I leave you with two images: a neighborhood cricket fighting ring on the rooftop next door, and my freaking cute nephew--who is certainly one of the best things about China.

The Curse of the Fitted Sheet and Other Tales of Domestic Life in China

It seems we are cursed. When we came to China, we brought one set of sheets with us to get us started, but we accidentally showed up with two fitted sheets. It was really hot when we first got here, so it was okay to sleep without covers for awhile. Eventually I went to the store to buy a flat sheet, but all the packaging was in Chinese, so I couldn't tell what was a duvet cover what was a flat sheet and what was a pillowcase, so I went to Wal-Mart (unbelievable that I have spent most of my life avoiding Wal-Mart and now it is our neighborhood store, where we go sometimes three times a week...the world is indeed getting too small), where the packages were clearly marked in English. I bought a "Flat Sheet," brought it home, opened it, and found elastic at all the corners. With my language skills it is impossible to return anything to Wal-Mart, so we kept it and now we had three fitted sheets, which piled on our bed were warm enough to get us through the cooling fall nights. Weeks later I went to a textiles market with Gina where you can pick out your fabric and have sheets made. Now that the weather has really turned to autumn I thought it would be nice to have some flannel sheets, and since I haven't seen them in the store (and have given up on buying linens at the store entirely), I picked out a fabric and for ten dollars had a set of sheets made while we were at lunch. Gina's Chinese is excellent and she did a great job explaining that I needed a fitted sheet and a flat sheet, but maybe I don't even need to tell you that when we got home (a 20 minute bus ride, followed by a 40 minute subway ride, followed by a 15 minute bike ride), I went to see if the sheets fit on the bed and discovered that he had made two fitted sheets. So, now we have a grand total of five fitted sheets and no flat sheets and I think I'm going to sleep in my sleeping bag for the winter.

Similar to the sheet story is the story of our front door key. Our apartment only came with one set of keys, but people make keys all over the city, so we went to a locksmith and had our keys copied. We have three keys: a key for our building gate, a key for our apartment gate (which is also guarded by a golden lion head), and our front door key. All the keys here are weird. There must be fifteen different templates. Some have four edges like a philips screwdriver, and our front door key is carved on the top and the bottom flat edges rather than along one thin edge like we're used to in the States. This is apparently a difficult key to make and our expensive copy didn't work. Even with a script from Gina about how to tell the man that the key he made us didn't work, many things came between us and getting our key fixed. Weeks passed. Last week we found ourselves in a part of town we'd never been to--a place four blocks from our house where it seemed like no one had ever seen a foreigner before. Shanghai is full of these twilight zones, and while we were exploring on our bikes we passed a stall with key-making equipment, so we stopped and gestured that we wanted our key copied. There was a boy of about 14 working and he really wanted our business so he kept us there even though he didn't have the right equipment to make our unique key. He disappeared into the back and returned with a small rice bowl full of Sprite for us, which we drank and took as an apology. We continued our exploration and came across a small pedestrian street full of vendors, one of which was a locksmith. We watched him work for ten or fifteen minutes on our key. The street was full of food vendors, an outdoor barbershop, and shoe-shiners, and we were stared at by everyone who passed, but the man appeared to be meticulously copying our key and we left happy with our brush with pedestrian life in China and our new shiny key (half the price of the first one we had made). Long story short, it didn't work either, so now we have three front door keys and only one that works. Will we try again? Stay tuned to find out.

Finally, there is the story of the buzzing contraption in our kitchen. It is some kind of gas detector (the natural gas here has no odor, so there's no way to know when there's a gas leak...no smoke detectors either, so there's lots of potential for domestic disasters), which is attached to the gas line into the kitchen. It emits a staticky buzzing noise every morning, which we can't turn off because if we disarm it, it turns off the gas to our house. We're pretty sure it's malfunctioning, but maybe we have a gas leak, but only in mornings? Who knows? Also I think we have a ghost who deep fries in our kitchen when we're gone. Every time we come home it smells like someone's oily Chinese dinner is ready on the table. Gross and creepy.

Magical Tongue Party

Sometimes I think of teaching in China as just a job. It's just a way to make some money so we can enjoy life in Shanghai. But that's what I always think about teaching, until I'm actually doing it, until I'm actually in front of the class, interacting with young people with interesting lives and elastic brains, which is when I remember just how much I love it (and love getting paid for something so easy and enjoyable).

My students are charming. They are all first-year master's students at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics with majors like investment banking, sports marketing, and public accounting. They know way more than I do about these things, but their English is not very good. That's why they take "Communicative English" as an elective.

Most Chinese students have been studying English since they were about 12. Some learned from foreign high school or college teachers, but most learned from heavily accented English-speaking Chinese teachers. Most of their native-English exposure comes from shows like Prison Break, which they watch voraciously on bootlegged DVDs with the subtitles on. For many of them, I am the first native-English speaking teacher they've ever had.

Most of my students have English names, a tradition most foreign language classes have. Just like I was Pilar throughout high school Spanish. Their English names become their alter-ego and some keep the same name from middle school, while others change their English names every year as their interest in pop-culture changes and their self-esteem changes. Here is a short, but representative list of some of my students' names:

Agnes

Ivy

Yolanda

Eleven

Young King

Nancy

Doris

Cherry

Rainy

Shiny

Shinysun

Simba

Yo Yo

Rink

Alfred

Knight

Chaucer

Silence

Devil

Happy Baby

I try my hardest not to ever call on Shinysun or Happy Baby, because I can't say them without laughing. Some students had never had to choose an English name and wanted me to name them. They all want something meaningful, but I told them that English names don't mean much. They ask what Jennifer means and I tell them it was the most popular name in 1979 and also the name of the main character in a popular movie in the late-70s, and that it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes I ask them to tell me their Chinese name and I pick the name that sounds closest to it in English. Pei Pei became Peggy, etc. But one student really wanted a "meaningful" name, so I asked him what he was interested in. He said money, so I named him Rich, which I said was a common English name but also meant wealthy. The next week he came to me saying that while Rich was a nice name, he had decided to go by BMW instead. Another student whose Chinese name means "time," is thrilled with his new name, "Eon," which I am quite proud of myself and think is a very cool name.

For one of our first assignments, I had my classes choose a new class name. This was a marketing exercise and a way to get them to creatively collaborate ("brainstorm" was one of their vocab words), but I also told them that I didn't think that "Communicative English" was very indicative of what the class was about. So they had to choose a name that would effectively convey what the class meant to them. I told them we would use the name every week to refer to the class. This was also a way for me to distinguish between my four identical class full of forty identical faces and identically ridiculous names. The assignment was mostly a success. It enabled me to hear some of their goals for learning English this semester and the importance of English they anticipated in their professional lives.

My favorites were Mouthstorm, English Dream Studio, and the Magical Tongue Party, but I was out-voted in every class and now I am the proud instructor of English PIE (Participation, Improvement, and Enjoyment...and because pie is tasty and makes us feel good), the J-Zone (named after a popular China Mobile ad campaign...of course the J stands for Jennifer, whose personal life they seem to care more about than learning English because I am the only foreigner most of them have ever known), 304 (our classroom number...no marketing majors in that class, but I think it's catchy like a product number or something...very functional), and JJYY (which stands for nothing..."you know, like Google" they told me).

Peculiar Cultural Traits

We are getting used to living abroad, and while China will never feel like home, our sense of what home is changes with each passing week. Already we are thinking about where we will go from here. Anywhere in the world would be easier than China. There's a lot to learn when your new home is in a totally different culture, and that's, of course, where most of the adventure lies. We weren't prepared for Chinese life. If we didn't have family here, we wouldn't have had any expectations. Peter's school didn't tell him what day classes started, how to get to campus from the airport, how to register for classes....nothing. I only had my brother to say, now, when you get off the plane, here's how to get in a cab, here's what to say to the cab driver, etc.

So, now that we are thinking about our next move already, we are looking into living in other countries. We will return to the States eventually, but for now, the world is ours. We are feeling especially drawn to Scandinavia. We have been impressed with all the Norweigians and Swedes and Danes we have met and in just a few minutes of preliminary research, Peter came across more than one website devoted to preparations for moving to a new Scandinavian country. Norway, for instance, makes sure that you remember to budget for all the thick sweaters you will have to buy upon arrival. And Sweden has a site that thoroughly explains all the "Peculiar Cultural Traits" of Swedish life. Swedes are punctual, law-abiding, and respectful, it explains. It is also important to know how to form queues when you go to the bank or the grocery store: "The habit of forming queues may in part stem from the importance attached to egalitarianism in Swedish political thought and practice which, in turn, has permeated most aspects of Swedish society. This is reflected in the large number of women represented in parliament and government but is also apparent in everyday occupations."

No such website or philosophy exists in China. No one can explain so succinctly how Chinese politial thought and practice can be reflected in everyday occupations. And if there were such a prepatory site, I think it would only encourage people to stay in their country of origin. If we had been forewarned that we might be spit on and called "foreign devils" and pushed off a subway car into the swiftly closing doors as part of China's peculiar cultural traits, we would probably be in Oslo right now.

So, here is a short list of China's peculiarities that I would have liked to know about ahead of time.

1. The Chinese like to throw raw meat directly into their shopping carts, so choose your cart carefully and never put your jacket or purse or anything that you care about into the shopping cart. Along the same lines, it's probably best to avoid the bulk raw meat bins entirely--where people can dig through meat chunks with their hands, selecting the pieces they want and throwing them in their carts and discarding the pieces they don't want back into the bin.

2. Spitting, coughing, burping, farting, and littering are all socially acceptable in any situation.

3. It's okay to wear your pajamas, underwear, and/or slippers out in public.

4. Don't look for the eggs in the refrigerated section of the grocery stores. They're not there. They're packed in straw in the middle of the store.

5. Street lights, lane dividers, stop signs, etc., are purely for decoration. They have no significance.

6. Cars and trucks have the right of way. Car drivers are richer, bigger, and more impressive (even though they themselves were simple bicycle riders just a year ago) than bikers or pedestrians, therefore they can do whatever they want and you need to get out of their way.

7. You don't have to worry about separating your recyclables in China. There are people who get paid to dig through your trash and sell your glass and plastic to recyclers. Separating these items for them only undermines their garbage authority.

8. It's okay to urinate wherever and whenever you want. And if you're from the countryside, number 2 is okay too.

Consider yourselves prepared and properly forewarned.

Golden Week

This past week has been a holiday week. The October Golden Week is a week-long holiday celebrating Chinese National Day--the day the People's Republic of China was founded. Schools were closed and the Chinese traveled all over the country, but everything else seemed to be business as usual with lots of appliance sales and celebratory consumerism.

The holiday was a bit of a surprise to us, and we were both informed about the week off just a few days before the vacation started. We were also surprised to learn that we would have classes the weekend before the week to make up for classes missed during the week off. We didn't have enough time to plan a trip, so we decided to spend the week getting to know Shanghai.

Peter celebrated National Day with his first Chinese haircut. Things in China are changing rapidly, but it's nice to know that some services are still available on a very local level. This barber shop is located in the neighborhood next to ours. One night we were riding home at around 10:30 and noticed the barber's door was open and he was watching historic soap operas. Peter pantomimed that he wanted his head shaved and for 50 cents the man obliged.

We also took in some of the sites. We visited the fabric market where I found the man who made Peter some hats almost two years ago. He remembered the request and hand-tailored three more. What a wonderful service. He sews everything by hand and they are just beautiful. We also visited a buddhist temple, which was a peaceful repose from the throngs of people everywhere in Shanghai for the holiday. The temple was beautiful--a taste of what China looks like apart from the modern sky-reach of Shanghai. We visited with our friend Alejandra who is Buddhist, but because she is also Chilean is not a vegetarian.

At the end of the week, we went on an excursion with Grant and Gina and Winston to a park, where we actually saw the ocean that was reported to be nearby. The sea is easily forgotten in Shanghai. We never smell it and we never see it. The semi-unobstructed view of the horizon was refreshing, but the sea here is no Puget Sound. Imagine all the industrial waste from the mythical Yangtze toilet flushing into a body of water jammed with the some of the world's largest container ships. It was nice to get out of the city nevertheless and we experienced a very authentic cattle-car type Chinese ferry ride on the way back to town.

On Friday night we took our South American friends to a large "spa," the expanse and scope of which I don't have the time to describe here. It started out normal enough with naked soaking with Chinese people in rose-water pools, but eventually we were in matching pajamas, drinking Reeb in a row of plush recliners, watching Russian women dance poorly in costumes (thonged costumes). No cameras allowed, I'm afraid. Ah China.

Back to school again today and just in time as a new typhoon is pounding Shanghai and vacation is officially over.

I ger, you ger, we all ger for Uighurs

Ever since Peter and I arrived in China, we have been obsessed with a region in the far northwest called Xin Jiang, home to an ethnic minority called the Uighurs (pronounced Wee-gers). Xin Jiang is a land of high deserts reaching toward ice-capped peaks over 10,000 feet high. In the valleys, sheep graze in green melt-water meadows and the land is fertile enough to grow melons and grapes and fruit orchards. It is a dusty place with fantastic rock formations far far away from the urban jungle of Shanghai. It sounds exactly like Idaho, which is maybe why we feel so drawn to it.

Xin Jiang is a disputed province, a semi-autonomous region where the Uighurs culturally identify more with its neighboring central Asian countries. I won't get into the politics of it here, but to us it seems like the perfect part of China. Meaning not very Chinese at all. And that's why we want to go there. It is a 50-hour train ride though, and we don't have the time now to go, but in the meantime we have discovered a Uighur restaurant near our house. Uighur food is delicious: a mix between Mediterranean, Indian, and Chinese food that tastes very different from anything else we've eaten here. Lots of lamb and naan and hand-pulled noodles and wheat-flour dumplings filled with greasy meat. The Uighurs are also famous all over Asia for their melons and grapes which are in season now. It is the closest thing we have to a Mexican restaurant (good god what I wouldn't do for some refried beans and tortillas) flavored with cumin and cilantro and tomatoes and bell peppers. I could go on and on.

Here is Peter enjoying a lovely dish we had this week, which was a kind of tomato-based lamb stew served over flatbread (yes, with chopsticks).

We Call It Football Now

Well, since we arrived in China, we have become avid women's soccer fans. This was mostly because it was the only thing on TV that we could understand, and because the World Cup was being held in China it was on almost every night. At first it was better than the show where the guy is dressed like a monkey, but the more we watched, the more impressed we became with the players and the more we wished football was on in America, because it is a great sport. We watched almost every game, and it became an excuse to invite our new foreign friends over (such an international sport). Grant was watching too and throughout the games we didn't watch together we texted each other about the plays and frankly, it's the most caught up I've been in a sport since the Crimson Tide gymnastics team won the NCAA championship.

As a thank you gift to Grant for being so helpful during our first few challenging weeks in China, we bought tickets to the final game in Shanghai. The U.S. played Norway for third place and the Chinese were all cheering for Norway because they didn't want the Americans to win. Very strange to have all those black-haired fans for a Scandinavian team, and how disappointed they were when we won. Finally, Germany played Brazil for the championship, and the Chinese couldn't decide who to root for. They are dazzled by the Brazilians' fancy footwork, but when Germany started scoring, their cheers changed from "Ba-zi" to something that sounded like "Deutch-land." Many had their faces painted with both teams flags. They always want to be on the winners' side. I think large sporting events like this are new to the Chinese. They are just beginning to have the expendable resources to attend sporting events and they are learning from the foreigners how to act at such events. For instance, I have never seen such an intense version of the wave in all my life. It went around the stadium four or five times and even though the game was just about as rivoting as it could be, they seemed to enjoy watching the wave of cheering go around and waiting impatiently for their turn to stand up and yell. Very endearing. It was one of the best nights we've had in China so far, learning how big the international community really is and watching the Chinese get ready for the Olympics, which will be more of a trip for them than it will be for any foreign visitors.