China By Numbers:

50 cents worth of oranges....

Adorably Tiny Pizza Box (Chopsticks added for scale):

1/6 of the apples given to each English teacher to celebrate the 10th anniversary of NIT's founding:

1 wok full of water after one night of air conditioner incontinence  (above)

7 Cold Chinese Delicacies to celebrate 62 years of Communist China (yeah, I can't get past 6 either):

The Sound of China

My latest facebook post mentions the non-stop firecrackers (they're good luck and used to celebrate store openings, weddings, and particularly good meals, as far as I can tell), and the constantly blaring military music that is a constant companion this time of year (I think the high school kids must be doing their compulsory military training now), but I thought it would be fun to chronicle the sounds I encounter as I walk from my apartment building down the street to grab something for dinner from the vendors (fried rice and long, corn and cabbage fried dumplings tonight).

Outside of our building, the first sound is kids shouting--the courtyard in front of my place is a general gathering place. Usually 8-10 kids are running/biking around, digging in the dirt, etc. Grandparents stand around and watch them and gossip.

For a constant backdrop, put in the whoosh of traffic (a busy straight runs parallel to ours), the blare of bus horns (the busses have to make their way through streets teeming with people and lined with food carts and various vendors selling everything from bras to mp4 players to blankets, and apparently feel constant blaring is the best way to do so) and the hum of electric bikes zipping everywhere, with the constant blatblat of their horns.

Add in the chatter. Probably a couple hundred kids milling around. The ningbonese dialect is widely agreed to be one of the least harmonious in China, and a simple conversation sounds, roughly, like two cats fighting.

Then add the blare of techno music that one of the sidewalk clothes vendors has put on.

The nonstop monotonic  "che-ge  che-ge" that someone has recorded into an automatic bullhorn to advertise his food.

The sizzle of rice and noodles hitting the wok. The scrape of cooking utensils. The chop of cleavers on wood.

Sometimes I love the bustle, the aliveness, the engagement.

Sometimes it's nice to retreat to my 16th floor apartment, where only the road hum, firecrackers, and military music remain.  

Daily Life

So, as I have for the last two years, I'm going to really try to be more frequent about this. I think if I didn't write 8 page posts I'd be less loath to update, so I'm  going for short and sweet here, which is not really my forte.

I just wanted to give some glimpses into my "typical day" here--well, trypical sunday. Mr Wang, an older professor who is a friend of mine, asked me to go swimming with him. Swimming is very popular here now--I actually also went last night with my friend Maggie, who has a membership at the hotel across the street from her. Her place has just installed a sauna, which I'm already looking forward to when it gets chilly. I thought Wang (and my friend Jane, who he also invited) and I would go to our school's pool, which is a full sized pool. It's open a few hours each afternoon, and wall to wall student, so it's more of a cooling bath than a swim. Instead, we went to the yingzhou municipal pool, where jane and i had gone earlier this week. It's a nice pool and fairly uncrowded, with actual lanes for swimming. the mother of a little boy Wang is tutoring drove us, which is nice--jane and i walked earlier this week and it's a good 40 minutes away. We all had a great time at the pool--wang and i raced (he won, by a hair), jane raced with the little boy, and wang and I tried to teach jane and the little boy to dive rather than belly flop. There were a surprising amount of laowais there, which I said to jane quietly and she affirmed to me in a loud voice in the dressing room as two were standing next to me

Jane and nina and I then got together  for lunch. we took the bus downtown to a lebanese ("muslim," for jane and nina) restaurant we'd been to before. It's pretty good, though the olives are canned. I like that I'm the food expert there as opposed to chinese places, where i kind of just trust what others order for me. Btw, the chinese for hummus is hummus.

We ordered a ridiculous amount and then nina, according to jane, was very unladylike in telling the waiter to hurry because she was dying of hunger. This led to a discussion of metaphors. Apparently, a euphimism for death in chinese is "riding the crane to the western lands," which i love. Also, breasts can be called "mantou" (fried buns") or your "career line." So you can see our conversation ran the gamut.

we staggered out of the restaurant at 2 pm and wandered around for about 15 minutes, stopping in stores and going through the old market, where it appeared every teenager in Ningbo was out (the old town is now filled with lots of tiny shops selling cosmetics/clothes/stationary/general cute things and is anchored by a mcdonalds and jackie chan fast food place). Nina wanted to go to a place that sold food from shanxi, her home province, for dinner. While Jane and I insisted we were never eating again, when we got to the little storefront (they had about 6 tables and sold from the open window in front of the store) it looked so good, we made nina get us some too. There were cold noodles (rice or wheat) with bean sprouts and cucumber and spongy tofu. They mixed a sauce in a seperate plastic baggie with lots of vinegar, chili sauce and some other components--you dump the sauce on the noodles when you are ready to eat it. I also had what was basically a sandwich--with a very long chinese name-- with a chewy flat bun and chopped lamb inside. It was very good and very different from typical ningbo cuisine, which tends to be ricy, salty and pickled vegetably. I was reminded how regional chinese food is--i've barely scratched the surface of its variety.

Taxi home and then a big nap before eating my shanxi dinner. Btw, i love that every single one of my colleagues, when hearing my schedule (i teach 9:50-12:15) has nodded their heads and said "that is good. it means you have time to sleep in the afternoon"

and this is my version of short and sweet