How to...

There have been quite a few stories due to the simple/very complex issue of the language barrier.



Go to the bathroom (as a women or a man who needs to squat for that matter)

Many of you may have heard of the oh so sanitary squat-pot. This is basically a porcelain hole in the ground. The task of squatting without peeing down your leg is extremely difficult, and I've learned to carry tissues and hand sanitizer everywhere. Some are more discusting than others. I believe Jeremy alluded to the one in the middle of the street in Moganshan, that was the worst. They aren't "horrible" in restaurants, but a wierd concept nonetheless.



Get a manicure/pedicure:

There are massage parlors about every 30 feet. Deciding which to go to depends on whether or not you want a "happy ending" or "more throrough service." Massage parlor type can usually be determined if the windows are a very dark tint, or there are women in matching outfits and platform stripper shoes out front, however most places have the option if requested.



A friend and I wanted to get a mani/pedi, and we went into a more reputable place. By reputable, we knew we would not be propositioned afterward. The two of us were ushered into a room upstairs; the room was decorated in pink and purple satin and lace, very gaudy. We were then instructed (through pantomimes and gestures) to lay down. I don't know if all of our readers have had a manicure, but this is not usually done in an isolated room lying down. It was the slowest process ever! There were about 10 girls working there and one came up to do both of our nails. After about an hour, my friend and I decided we didn't want to stick around for the pedicure. We decided to get massages instead, because that is the specialty around here. I'm still looking for a place to get a pedi.



Use a squat pot while getting a manicure:

Not easy! Before I began my massage, I really had to go to the bathroom. (Which I asked to do through pantomime and gesture.) The woman escorts me downstairs to the bathroom, and I walked in. She followed. Walks over and undoes my pants and pulls them down to my ankles. I'm standing there letting her do this because I can't tell her not to. She turns around, takes two steps, stops, and waits. She's waiting for me to finish going to the bathroom in a squat pot! There's no toilet paper, but I can't communicate that I want some. So I go to the bathroom. When I'm finished, she turns back around, walks over, and pulls up my pants, buttons them, waits for me to wash my hands and leads me out. Needless to say, it was so awkward and uncomfortable. I ended up peeing down my pant leg. Gross!



I went back upstairs and began to tell my friend. We are cracking up! This is also awkward, because we are clearly laughing about the situation and they have no idea what we're saying. Then again, their probably laughing at us to because we have no idea what they're saying. As for the massage, it was wonderful, although my friend and I were instructed to undress right in front of each other, and the two Chinese women. It's funny how private we are as Americans.



Make friends with old Chinese men:

As many of you know, I enjoy making friends wherever I go (probably an understatement). Jeremy, 2 other friends/teachers from school and I went out to eat one evening at a place with a semi-english menu (rarely found and always a treat). As we're eating, we've been stared at the during the entire meal (we are a spectical everywhere we go). So I finally lift my glass and say, "gam bai" to the table of 5 Chinese men across from us.



In Chinese "gam bai" is like saying "cheers," however it literally translates to bottom's up, which they take very seriously. You can't say, "gam bai" and not finish your drink, regardless of how much is in the glass/bottle. So of course, they get a kick out of this and come over and challenge us to "gam bai" contests. In China it's extremely rude to turn down drinks. When drinking in company, they literally drink until they puke. In fact, while I was summoned to the other table to "gam bai" with our new friends (who did I mention had been there since 10am and it was dinner time), the shirtless (yes disgusting shirtless fat old) man at a different table next to us turns to his right and vomits all over the ground, right where I would have been sitting; so glad I had moved! No one batted an eye, the waitress came over and put down some newspaper, and everyone kept drinking. After that, the men continued to buy us round after round and we returned the favor, which made them so excited. So we were cheers-ing and having broken Chinglish conversations, they then began taking pictures with us; hopefully we don't end up on Chinese interent. Finally, remembering we had to work in the morning, we tore ourselves away and went home. We made plans to meet them at the same time and place the next night, but regretted to show. What a crazy night!



As an aside, Chinese men grow their fingernails long to show that they do not do manual labor. Generally it's only one or two, usually the thumb and pinky. They grow them about 1 inch. They turn all yellow and gross. So disgusting! All of our new found friends had gorgeous non-laboring hands. It's a wonder manicures are so forign?

-Christine

Moganshan

Christine and I just finished a three day weekend over what they call the
"National Holiday." We went with a group of around 25 (10 of whom we already knew) to an area called Moganshan. Moganshan used to be a big expat summer house location, but that all ended during the Cultural Revolution. The tour group is called Bohdi Bikes, and it consisted of a full day of hiking (4 hours, 4 miles, and 2,500 ft of elevation) and then a full day of biking (4 hours, 26 miles, and 1000 ft of elevation). It was advertised as being for beginners, but thanks to the typhoon that hit the coast to the west of us, it was a little more intense than expected.

We were bussed 3.5 hours out of Shanghai early Saturday morning. We were dropped off with Dan, our western tour guide, and Orange and Vince, our Chinese tour guides. They weighed us down with bottled waters and sandwiches, gave us our first glimpse of how bad squat pots can get, and we set off. The first sight was a working coal mine.

Coal train

This guy unleashed an avalanche on us. Fortunately, no one was killed.

They store coal in this building.


A view of the town of Moganshan as we start to climb.

That first day we climbed stairs through a bamboo forest. Mist obscured the distant hills. Our tour guide said that it was normally much clearer, and blamed the fog on the typhoon.




We climbed a lot of these


I don't know anything interesting about this old Chinese house.


This rubble was a house owned by a German family. It's address is 210 (shout out).


Dan was feeling adventurous, so after about an hour and a half of hiking he proposed adding a loop that he claimed would take an extra hour or so. No one complained, so we kept going up hill.


The long hike option.

People paint their family names on the bamboo to claim territory.


Caution! Beware of Pandas.



Guai Shi = Strange Rock, Monster Rock, Surprised Rock, or Queer Stone


I was born in the year of the Pig, so I rubbed his ears for good luck.


This guy is drying tea in a heated metal bowl.


Washing your hands in this spring is supposed to bring wealth. It's even safe to drink.

Chinese tourists being carried around in chairs. They had numbers, like race cars.


This little guy made his dad come talk to us. I think he was afraid I was going to steal his walking stick. It would have been so easy...


Christine and I looking sweaty and gross.

A view of town from the top of the mountain.


We finished the extra "hour long" loop about 2.5 hours later, and our guide balked at hiring cabs to bring us to the hotel. We had started backtracking when the fog got noticeably thicker and it started pouring on us. We made it back to an old, toothless woman who had sold us water earlier in the day and Dan found a taxi driver who made a special trip to bring back a bus large enough for all of us.


Our hotel. The air conditioning dripped all over Christine during the night.

The hotel wouldn't win any awards, but it was comfortable enough for a night. Our guides cooked us Chinese style BBQ while we crammed into a stairwell to stay out of the rain. Christine and I met an interesting Finnish couple and got some valuable pointers on traveling through China. We tried to watch "The Big Lebowski," but the audio was messed up so everyone sounded like chipmunks. It was funny at first, but the Dude was not meant to sound like Alvin. I think everyone was asleep by 8:30.


Day 2 was bike day. We took fewer pictures, since the camera was stowed away in a backpack for most of the day. The ride started with a huge, fun downhill. We regrouped at the bottom, and Orange led us to the reservoir.

Christine and I on day 2, after the downhill. We were in the fast group, since we're so cool.

There were tons of tea fields around the reservoir.


We got lost in the tea field.


From far away, the tea fields look like grape fields.



Christine and I posing with Orange, the leader during part of the biking day. Like our helmets?


My friend Nichols and I. He teaches at SHSID too.



Christine's artistic vision.

After the reservoir, our path started going slightly uphill. Then it started raining. Then we went off road. Slogging through the mud got pretty difficult, and there were a few falls. By this time we knew that Dan was full of it every time he described the next section. Once we got through it there was a snack shop waiting, and 1 kuai could buy a bag of chips. That's a bag of chips for less than $0.15. As part of the tour, we were shown the pot plants which were growing on the side of the road.



Pot plants grow wild in Moganshan. Don't do drugs kids.

The last leg of the ride started by going through a dark tunnel through the hillside. Then we had a bunch of fun downhill switchbacks as we headed back to the town we had started day 1 from. They bussed us back to the hotel for showers and a Chinese style banquet (I'm already tired of being served a plate of crap [chicken feet, sea slugs, sea cucumbers, etc, etc] that both they and I know nobody is going to touch).

We were dropped off back in Shanghai by 7 on Sunday night. The trip was a great start to our traveling adventures here in China. We've been inspired to get bikes to ride around the city, hopefully expanding our stomping grounds in Shanghai, and maybe giving us a reason to keep exercising while we're here.

Now I really should get back to making my 6th grade MS Excel lesson plan. Do you know how hard it is to explain how Excel works to someone who can't understand "left click on the black line?" It's the kind of thing that's hilarious an hour or two later. When I'm actually saying, "No, that's a right click" for the fifteenth time, though... well, that's kind of aggravating.

-Jeremy

The Job

After arriving on Friday we began Job Orientation on Monday. Similar to many orientations it was a lot of people talking at you with a lot of information. It was interesting to get a glimpse of the politics at the school. It was clear that certain people were allotted an hour time slot based on their position at the school or the importance of "Face," a very interesting Chinese concept. Face is what gives this culture their passive aggressive nature, especially in business. It is more important to avoid offending someone than to efficiently confront them. Direction and organization is nonexistent. After a week of "orientation" we still had no idea what we were doing in our first class on Monday.

After our week of Orientation we went out for a banquet, we've been to three to date. They love them! They're not so bad all you can eat all you can drink. It's pretty fun. After this particular banquet we went on a cruise on the Huang Pu River in Shanghai. It was cool to see the city at night.

This was the boat we took down the Huang Pu River
The Pearl Tower at night




Shanghai from the River at Night


This is a photo from a van we rented to drive us home. It's pretty hard to get a cab at night, so there are all these non-registered vehicles that will drive you. We bargined a price before we got in and then they took us home. It ended up cheaper than a normal cab. Yikes!

Our first day of school

The classes are divided into Native and Non-Native speaking students and then ranked by students ability within those categories. The majority of the students are from Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Jeremy is teaching in the Junior High School. He has four sixth and seventh grade non-native computer classes, a seventh grade non-native history class and a sixth grade ESL class, which he will have to tell you hilarious communication stories about.

I am teaching in the high school. I teach Native 10th grade honors English, which is equivalent to an honors 10th grade class in the States. The students in that class are very motivated and half of the class has lived in the US. Most of these students will enter the school's International Bacheloriate (IB) program in the 11th grade. The school has a heavy emphasis on testing, consequently the students are programed to be concerned with rubrics and evaluation.

Last Tuesday, before beginning to read a short story I was discussing with my class things that made them feel comfortable in a new place. They could all relate to this, being international students. Then I asked them how they made others feel comfortable, or how they reached out to new kids in school. They said they didn't. It was so interesting to hear them talk about their lack of social life and their concern only for school and academics. There are no real clubs, organizations, or sporting teams at the high school. Students are simply grouped by academic performance. So I gave them the assignment to meet someone new in a week and record how it went. They were absolutely baffled, asking me the format for their recording and the parameters for meeting a new person. I was shocked.

I am also teaching a non-native 12th grade English class. This is probably the most difficult class in the high school, because these are not the brightest students and by far the most unmotivated. Because they are not gaining prestige for the HS as far as test scores go, they are basically disregarded. They try to sleep in class and don't do their homework, which is interesting because all of them say they want to attend University; most will attend in their home countries. Their entire curriculum is geared toward taking the TOEFL exam. It's so boring! I try to think of creative things to do with them, but their so hard to get any feed back from, they basically just sit and stare at me. I feel like a one woman charade.

I'm teaching 11th grade non-native plus level English. They are more lively and motivated so we have a good time. I think they think I'm totally crazy because I run around the class doing outlandish demonstrations in order to explain the things we're working on. They laugh a lot.

My schedule was originally those three classes, however I went in one day to ask the director a question regrading the PSAT. They wanted me to dedicate every class period for five weeks to studying the PSAT with my 10th grade honors English class, which is absolutely ridiculous and extremely boring. I later found out they needed to increase their PSAT scores in order to become an SAT testing site in Shanghai so that the school gains prestige and more money. When I was in his office in his round about Chinese-style of asking/telling. He got me teaching a PSAT course for 80 mins one day a week. I told him I'd have to check my schedule and he told me he'd already checked it and I didn't have class so I would be available, creepy right? So the pulled this class of 11th graders out of PE and now they take 80 mins of English PSAT class one day a week and 80 mins of Math one day a week instead of gym! The good news is I get paid and extra 400RMB a week or about $60 just to basically be a test proctor, but I feel horrible for the students!

This weekend we went down the People's Square and walked to the Huang Pu River along what they call the Bund. People's Square is basically like Time's Square in NYC times about 10. It's huge! After that we met some friends at a restaurant for 1/2 price happy hour. The restaurant was called Barbarossa and it's situated on an island in the middle of the park (like a Central Park type feel) After that we met more people out for all you can eat all you can drink Japanese. It was amazing!

Photos from our outing:


The Subway... People EVERYWHERE!


Goverment Building on the Bund- Notice all the flags

It's like a bike-athon eveywhere you go!

Dad, is this knot of wires hanging from the sky what you were talking about when you said they didn't have the same building codes/regulations?

Chinese Streets

Peoples Square-Nanjing Road

The Bund during the day





I want to add more pictures but it won't let me. I'm sleepy now. I'll try to figure it out later. Good Night, Christine