12 great movies (some still in theatres) – 60RMB
Dinner for 6 – 70RMB
20-minute cab ride – 11RMB
Rice cooker – 35RMB
Bottle of water – 1RMB
Harry Potter Book (Hardcover - New) – 25RMB
Friends Season 9 Box set – real – 20RMB
Huge, comfortable towel – 15RMB
$1.00 = 8.00RMB
1.00Kr = 1.23RMB
Living in China, experiencing the Chinese culture and language first hand, being the only foreigner – Priceless
Cheesy? Sure. True? Yes! Fascinating? Absolutely!
I arrived in Beijing, China on Friday the 17th of February. I came to Taiyuan on the evening of Sunday the 19th. I have now been in China for two weeks. Every minute has been amazing, full of new experiences; constantly learning something new. I had some wonderful traditional Chinese food in Beijing (it didn’t taste that different from the food we get in a Santa Cruz Chinese restaurant). I did get to see quite a bit of Beijing. The forbidden palace was awesome! Well okay it was a lot of big buildings, a lot of stone and a lot of walls but it was pretty cool, definitely huge and full of a LOT of history. I also saw the summer palace which was much more beautiful and not in the centre of the city. If you go into the garden of this palace you have a wonderful view over a lake, some of Beijing and many beautiful mountains. There were quite a few foreigners at the summer palace; maybe one in fifteen people did not look Chinese. Random, I ran into three Danes…what are the chances?
On Sunday I flew to Taiyuan, I arrived fairly late so some teachers picked me up and took to me my “temporary” accommodation. My room is on the top floor, the 11th floor of an apartment building and has an amazing view! Unfortunately it only has one room and a bathroom, no kitchen. So the idea was that I would stay there until they found a suitable flat for me but this is proven very difficult as everything has been let out for the school term. Yesterday I came to the school with the suggestion that they slightly remodel my room by putting a floor in (there is currently only a cement pad), adding a kitchen (there is room for one in the hallway) and giving me a washing machine. It would make sense for the school to do this as they own it and then they can use it for other teachers like me that come to teach for a short amount of time. So now I’m hoping they will agree to remodel the room because I would really like to stay there, it is in a great location it just needs some utilities and it would be easy and cheap to do.
There is no nice way to say it, the city of Taiyuan is disgusting. Smog is in the air everywhere I look around (love is in the air theme). I can feel, I can smell that I’m breathing dirty air. This is a coal-mining city that has little or no laws about pollution or so it seems. It’s slightly amusing that I can hear the explosions from the mines during the night and day, especially from my flat. I imagine that is what it would have been like during something like the civil war with canons going off in the distance. If you leave a white serviette on the window ledge for the day it will be brown when you get home. My friend Karolina from Poland washed her white jacket, two days later it was light brown…smog, smog, smog!
The school, Taiyuan Foreign Languages School is nice. I would never dream of using the toilets there (yes I walk home) but that’s the same in the US – well anyone who knows me. I see the hole in the ground toilets and I think of a certain AIESEC twins in San Jose that would not be able to liver here. My classes are not exactly small infract they’re huge! I have anywhere from 60-85 students in each class. I have 17 classes that I meet with once a week so I have over 1100 students. Yeah, I will not be learning their names any time soon. All the classrooms are equipped with projectors and such so I’m happily using powerpoints and all that fun multimedia. I teach some very loud and interactive classes, I don’t think the teachers or the students have ever seen anything quite like it and they all seem to love it. I’m having a great time, speaking definitely seems to be my thing. Unfortunately with such large classes I can’t give them homework (If I had each of them write an essay I would be reading for a loooooooooong time, imagine having to read over a 1000 essays, sure it can be done but, no thanks).My students are from 13-16 years old so they are fun but they are also very much teenagers well...I don’t really feel they have much of a chance to be teenagers as they are always in school. Until last week they had been going to school from 7 in the morning until 9 at night with a break from 12-2:30 for lunch, nap or many students have private lessons during that period. They also go to school on Saturday so it almost never stops. When they don’t have school they have private lessons or homework, it’s really sad. On Friday the school system decided they students were spending too much time in school so now they get out of school at 8 PM instead of 9. – Jacob, I guess you can’t complain about Valencia.
Famous movie in Denmark, I Kina Spiser de Hunde (In China they eat Dogs). In answer to my grandfather’s question, yes, in some places they do. Some other AIESEC trainees had been out to eat dog the day before I arrived, they had pictures. If my memory serves me correctly, none of them kept it down (it all came back up later).A couple of days ago it snowed. This made me very happy…why? Well first of all snow is always beautiful even in a smog-ridden city. The snow also brings some humidity as it melts (this city is so incredibly dry – lay on with the chap stick). Finally the snow helps clean the air a little bit so that I can get to breathe some fairly decent air. I have not seen any snow ploughs or salt out on the street. I have seen people falling, cars sliding… Which brings me to another point, driving. I would not dare drive here in China, they are crazy! Few stop lights and stop signs mean that if they want to get from one end of an intersection to another they just go and hope that the cars coming from the other directions will slow down and/or stop so they can get through.
Walking around the streets I think to myself “I wonder if this is what it’s like to be famous.” People stare, people follow me, people take pictures of me, people try to talk to me, people expect me to pay more because I must be wealthy. I can’t say that I don’t like it; the constant flow of compliments is nice but those of you who know me well also know how red I get. People truly get to see many shades of white, pink and red.
I love being here in China. I’m having so many great experiences and learning so much about their culture. Maybe in my next update I can share more about what I have learned about their culture. I want to get this out now as I seem to keep avoiding it, I’ve been able to keep very busy. I hope you are well. Please e-mail me, let me know what is going on in your life, what you are up to.
