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     

Ningbo Snow!

Oh my goodness, it snowed today! This is a once every three years kind of thing in Ningbo, so it was a major deal. As Jane, Nina and I walked home under what would be starlight, if China was not filled with pollution, so it was instead a sort of sullen reddish glow (how Victorian a description is that?) we engaged in  a full out snowball fight. Ningbo High School, one of the top high schools in the city, has its dorms right behind our apartment complex and you could hear all the kids shrieking with excitement and their own snowball fights.

 (By the way, major props to my students who managed to work pictures of this "lovely gift grom God" into their oral presentation about a survey on Ningbo's environment)

We were out so late (got home about 10), because we did a “triplets,” as we refer to each other, goodbye dinner tonight. Friday I’m taking a bunch of friends out and Jane and Nina will be there as well, of course, but this was a more private affair. Tuesday was my friend Maggie’s bday and Emily and Jeremy and I took her out (except, Chinese style, she insisted on paying), so I’ve been lucky to have special dinners with all my chinese besties.

Food porn time. Last night, we went to a Mongolian place I’d been to with Maggie last year. We had lamb one million ways: on skewers (they do killer lamb skewers here—a perfect mix of lean and fat that gets all crusty and cuminy); in a tinfoil packet with fried naan (I think that included lamb stomach, but we just pretended it was curvy lamb); stir-fried with pickled cabbage and rice noodles. We also had broccoli, a salad of onions and peppers, naan, fresh made yogurt (sprinkled with sesame seeds and birthday cake sprinkles), and mashed potatoes with soup on top (Emily’s bad choice). We talked and laughed and took a lot of bad pictures, and Maggie did a very interesting interpretation of her understanding of tourette’s (made funnier by knowing Maggie, who swears like a sailor). Afterwards we wandered around the night market and I did some fierce bargaining—Ningbo merchants fold far easier than do Shanghai ones.

Emily and Jeremy say I always get greedy and start eating the food before i remember to take pictures of it. I say I like food action shots.

Today, my triplets and I went to Grandma’s which is a chain from Hangzhou that just opened in Ningbo. Nina and Jane went at 3 to reserve a table, which is good—when we left at 7:30, the line went out the restaurant and around the floor of the mall it was in. Incidentally, best waiting room ever—they projected tom and jerry cartoons on the wall, had seats and tables and tea, biscuits and oranges for people waiting.


It was sort of a mix of foods, but really good. A chicken cooked in an iron pot which gave a roasted effect—lovely after months and months of stewed chicken. Sautéed cauliflower. Braised pork belly with dried fish. “Smashed greeb beans”—actually a pea puree. Greens. Thin slices of beef sautéed with onion and an egg. Taro filled pastry. A scallop apiece with vermicelli and minced pork—a Ningbo specialty. Hot coconut milk with Taro—purple milk!

Afterwards we went to starbucks to chat and then bussed home, because taxis were hard to come by what with the snow. On the bus we were just casually chattering away—a conversation that included why Americans thought boys holding hands was weird (totally common show of affection here), how Nina’s students always write that they enjoy sleeping with their roommates (funny addendum—I was having lunch with one of the professors here today and he was reminiscing about his group of friends at the last school he taught at and how they would get together for meals and to talk and sometimes even sleep together, but only the guys) , how people in China would never wear an even vaguely low cut shirt, but commonly wear stockings, knee high boots and short shorts, which I explained were pretty sexual clothes in the US. Anyway, it was a fairly wide ranging convo, including some teasing remarks about each other’s chests, and after we’d been chattering  for about 20 minutes this little Chinese girl says “Excuse me” (in English) and said she’s been listening and wanted to ask what I meant about concepts of personal space in china. Her English was gooood.  We tend to talk as if no-one can understand a word we say, and we were a bit mortified—these are not the kind of things you openly discuss in China. So our new rule is circumspect conversations on busses 363, 206 and 369—the ones that circle the local universities.

Birthday Excitements

I like to dedicate a lot of time and excitement to my birthday, so I took myself on a trip for it this year. I’ve been wanting to hit Sichuan and decided to skip sports day (actually 2 days in which all the freshman have to compete in track and fieldy type stuff, as do the teachers. So no classes those days, but we have to make them up on the weekend before and after, so it’s not really time off per se) and go. When I told my assistant Sandra, of my plans, she said I had to hit Jiuzhaigou. As  you can see from these pictures, she was right.

 

Jiuzhaigou is made up of mineral lakes and in the mountains of Sichuan. When I got there it had snowed the night before and the lakes were all fringed with snow but the trees were all still gold and red. In this case, I think the pictures are worth quite a few thousand words.

I stayed in a homestay with a Tibetan family (there are a lot of Tibetans in Sichuan). It was ok—the one woman who spoke English was busy with her restaurant, so I used a lot of very basic chinese with the grandmother, who knew 5 words of English: yak meat, barley wine and honey, all of which she tried to sell me. It was cool staying in a traditional Tibetan home, and the little 4 year old was a cutie.

 

He and I had a good time playing with my kindle—he loved the different pictures on the screen savers. We named things in Chinese (I have an excellent 4 year old vocabulary, even down to being able to make a joke about birds not being airplanes, that we laughed at for hours). There were some chinese people staying there as well who observed all this and told me (in very quick chinese) that my chinese was really good. To which I replied “ting buo dong” (“hear not understand”) because she said it too fast. And then I figured out what she’d said and we all laughed at me.


By the way, the first night I was in Juizhaigou, I stayed in a hotel with a very enthusiastic Tibetan desk guy, who took me to my room, insisted on holding hands with me on the way there, showed me this very exciting feature of the beds:

And then, I believe, he suggested through sign language that he could spend the night in the adjoining bed. At the very least, I had to hug him 4 times before he would leave the room.




Jiuzhai is 10 hours by bus from Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital. I flew one way, but it was pricey, so I bussed back. It was a wiiindy road. I nearly puked on the Flemish guy next to me (Jiuzhai is little known to foreigners, so the 6 of us there got to know each other. He and I had met in the park the day before and walked together for a few hours) then I took two phenergen and slept for about 8 hours straight. I think that rather disappointed the Flemish guy who I believe also would have liked to spend the night in an adjoining bed. Well, I did at least sleep with him.



Chengdu is a pretty neat town. It looks like I expected China to look before I came here: lots of old wooden buildings, red and gold, and dragons and lions

It also has tons of great parks, which were filled with people doing karaoke, dance lessons and sing alongs—I love public life in China

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Of course, the big draw of Chengdu is the pandas….

I like pandas because they never move, so they’re really easy to take pics of. We were not allowed to take pics of the baby pandas who were freaking adorable. There were about the size of puppies and there were 5 of them lying next to each other in a big wooden crib, rolling over each other. Precious. Red pandas are harder to take pictures of because they move:

One thing I did not enjoy about the panda park were the hordes of western tourists—loud, annoying western tourists. I slunk around trying to make it clear I was not with any of those groups and looking as Chinese as possible.

When I got back, I taught a class, and then joined my favorite girls in China for a birthday dinner. We went to a seafood place on Tian Yi square, the main plaza. We had crabs (because emily, after 13 years of vegitarianism is crab mad now), shrimp, some sort of fish, broccoli, fried pancakes, a stew with chicken and mushrooms, another chicken dish...i think a few more veggies. I insisted on paying because that's the tradition in China and it's practically impossible to get anyone to let me buy my own meal any other time. Here we all are after dinner and enjoying cake that we bought at a bakery and then ate at starbucks:

she started the frosting fight. also, she insisted i feed her the lacy chocolate part off the cake and then bit my finger. That's our yellow bear.

What did I do today?

My morning started with an 8 am call about bagpipes. Mr. Wang is one of the older professors here-- a really interesting guy who’s been a professional dancer, taught P.E. , and now teaches English. He often joins Nina, Jane and I on expeditions (his wife is a Dr., and busy a lot) and has an awesome Labrador retriever. He also has a daughter living in Ireland whom he asked to send him a bagpipe. Apparently it got here this morning in pieces and, of course, the first thought is to call the Jewish American. It took me quite a while to convince him I had neither bagpipe assembling or playing experience.




I mooched around in the morning (I only have a morning class once a week, so I have nice lazy mornings—I usually watch some illegally downloaded tv and grade and answer emails), skyped with the t-dub, and then headed off to teach a make-up class (because the Chinese semester goes through the end of January, we have to teach some extra ones now). Actually I gave a brief lecture on revising and then they took an exam while I graded career research papers (52 students. Arghh.)

I found out yesterday that I was required to attend a dinner with the department bigwigs today (which kind of sucked, bc Nina and I had a massage date, but you don’t get to argue with the administration. And you certainly can’t argue when two older Chinese women are telling you you’re going—they’re like Jewish grandmothers x10). So I hung out in the teacher office and graded. One thing I love about our office (which is just a ton of desks and 2 computers) is that we have a teacher nap room. Seriously. There’s a smaller room off the big room with about 6 lounge chairs and blankies. The Chinese are a people serious about naps—they deplore this modern business life where you only get an hour for lunch—how can a person have a decent meal and rest?

The teacher’s office, by the way, is at the end of a long covered passage way—basically the academic building is a bunch of buildings linked by outdoor passages. Mike suspects that the buildings, like college buildings in America built post-1969, prevent rapid gathering. The Chinese always tell me the buildings are so confusing bc they were built by the French. Anyway, I was crossing one covered walkway and heard shouts from the one across the courtyard, 2 floors down. It was two of my business students from last year, very excited to see me. Catherine shouted: “You look beautiful—your eyes! Your hair!” I love my Chinese paparazzi.

Anyway, the dinner/banquet was delicious. The cold dishes were laid out on the lazy susan first. There was a very nice roast chicken (without, for once, it’s poor little head staring at me), an awesome sliced lamb with a dry spice mixture (cumin, coriander, salt, pepper), eel, candied lotus root, seaweed and mushrooms, wine soaked dates, some sort of tendon-y thing, cucumbers to be dipped in a hoisin like sauce…I’m missing a few. Then they started bringing the hot dishes—a thin soup with red beans and sweet pickled vegetables; stir fried beef; a Ningbo style fish, stewed with ginger, green onions and some pickled veg; a more Sichuan style fish with lots of vinegary red chilis; scallops in their shells with vermicelli in soy; skewered shrimp, wrapped in foil and baked in spiced sal;, a big basket of steamed potatoes, sweet potatoes, chestnuts and various root veggies we don’t have in America; another soup with taro and bok choy; an egg pancake; little things that looked like pierogies made out of slightly sweet, glutinous rice flour; a hairy crab marinated in chili paste apiece, and, as the meal started to wind down, noodle soup (traditional for the end to fill any hunger left by the preceding), fruit (cantaloupe, watermelon, oranges, sugar cane) and peking duck.



I’m sure I’m missing a few, not just bc of the mass, but bc the main point of a dinner like this is drinking. You get a big cup and a little cup. The waitress fills the both with wine and you refill your little one from your big one so you can “gambei” or “bottoms up.” This, by the way, is a terrible system, since you are asking increasingly drunk people to pour red wine steadily—I don’t think that tablecloth will ever recover. There are general toasts, when we all tap our glasses on the table before drinking, and then, every three minutes or so, someone toasts someone else at the table and they stand up and clink glasses. My kindness in working for NIT, swimming and singing prowess, gift giving ability and health were all toasted. (Like a number of the other women, I filled my big glass with apple juice, and mostly toasted with it). At one point the party secretary came in, whose job, as far as I can see, is pretty much to attend fancy dinners and drink with us (he was, I think attending several dinners at the hotel that night—he sat with us for about 30 minutes and then left). I’ve met him at several other functions and though he doesn’t speak a word of English, he and I always have a nice time toasting each other.



After dinner I walked back with a group of professors. Pang, who is the dean of the school, was walking with me and we were discussing culture shock when we passed a bunch of retirees ballroom dancing in a park. This is pretty common by the way, and one of the things I really enjoy about China—people just live life a lot more publicly. Anyway, somehow Pang decided that I needed to dance with Liang, the chair of the department (who was soused, by the way—his job as chair at these is to get drunk—no one would let him drive there bc they wanted him to drink. His nickname, he said, is Liang doesn’t fall down). He grabbed our bags and pushed us out amongst the retirees, all of whom, of course, gathered around to watch the white person make a fool of herself. We did a basic waltz like thing, but then this guy jumped in and started making dirty dancing like motions—so Liang and I finished off disco style. Then an old lady in pink pajamas (retirees go everywhere in their jammies, to show they can—I am so adopting this plan once I join the aarp) grabbed me and we did a sort of modified shag like dance that involved a lot of spinning around and twirls. Then all the retirees invited me to join them again tomorrow, and we three headed home .

And that’s what a day in china is like.

Monkies

...yes, some of my Chinese friends do adjectivize monk this way.

So I've gotten pretty blase about temples-- you've seen 300 Buddhas, you's seen them all-- but they are often in beautiful spots:

TienTong, where we went last week, is a major center of Chan Buddhism (it's one of the birth  places of Japanese Zen Buddhism) and still has a bunch of monks around, doing monkie things

Both the expected....

...and the less traditional (monks, by the way, apparently often have killer electronics because they are sponsored by wealthy patrons)







By the way, the guy on our left led to one of the most interesting moments of the day. I don't know if you can see it, but the meditating monk has a blanket around his legs. My friends asked one of the other monks why and he explained that when you meditate your body is open to the world, so you become quite cold, Then he ushered us into one of the temple's 999 rooms (this one held a gian cooking pot taht had been donated in the 1600s so you could cook rice for a 1000 monks at once) and started a question and answer session about corporeality and existence. Of course all of this was in Chinese, so I just got the occasional translation from one of my friends, but I think that made it seem cooler and more mystic. He was very pleasant the whole time--I do like a guy who can proselytize while laughing