A pictorial guide to China...

As we head towards a new week of teaching we have been laughing about how unusual and perhaps, er, dangerous this place can be if you are not careful. We are contemplating getting a rope ladder since we live on the fifth floor of our apartment building, for example. I looked around the web, especially a really cool site called sinosplice.com, and found some ideas for describing what it's like over here - sort of like a pictorial guide to life in China.

Everybody knows how much we love it here, you can read what we are teaching this week here, so of course these are meant to be funny and satirical. The graphics (except for the last one) were grabbed from the ready.gov terrorism preparation homepage.

First off, I'd like to mention that being in China for any amount of time messes with your body. Especially when you first get here, actually, for about two months now we have been on again, off again. Systems most notably affected include the digestive system and respiratory system. We're talking serious diarrhea here, and dirty air which means frequent and colorful mucous. Get that? Glad we brought Imodium, and Sudafed, and tissues. Lots of tissues.




There are some seriously rank odors out there on the street. You've seen the hanging fish, meats, raw ducks, and chickens. Add rotting organic matter, urine, feces, stinky tofu.... But don't worry, soon you'll be gleefully playing "name that odor" with your Chinese friends!






About that food thing again...you will have some difficulty. This isn't "Panda Express," folks. Inconveniences include little rocks in your rice, tons of tiny, tiny little bones in the fish, pieces of chopped up bone inside meat. Then there's also the food that's just plain not good (like chicken feet, live eels, maybe?), or hazardous to your intestinal tract. But be adventurous anyway! You'll learn soon enough what not to eat. (Diarrhea, and the occasional food poisoning, are harsh but effective teachers!)



Sometimes the pollution is pretty bad. It might even make your eyes water some days, especially if you come from some wussy place with really clean air, like Florida for example. Dust is everywhere. Chinese people don't sit on the floor or ground or non-designated sitting places because everything is dirty. You'll get dirty. We get dirty just going to our classrooms everyday.





So you might find yourself washing a lot (at first). That's OK, though. Soon you'll learn -- filth is fun. It gives you "China stories" to call home about!








If you're coming to China, I hope you're not too tall. That can be inconvenient sometimes since the only really tall Chinese person is playing basketball for the Houston Rockets. It's also difficult if not impossible to find any size bigger than a medium here. Forget about large sizes like 10's or anything in a L or XL, so don't count on buying any thing fun like socks, or shoes, or pants.





It also helps if you're pretty healthy to begin with, and you've had your shots. Lots of shots. Sure, they have "modern" medical facilities here, but the standards may not quite be up to what you have come to expect in the West. And then there are the toilets; metal troughs built into the floor. Can't fight 5,000 years of progress so just accept that they are difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate most of the time. Solution? Pray for a handrail, always have toilet paper and hand sanitizer with you at all times, don't get sick, and don't get hurt!



Don't get too attached to elevators. In schools and apartment buildings with 7 stories or less, there are no elevators. According to Chinese building codes, elevators are only required in buildings taller than 7 stories. Hey, it's cool. Elevators are for capitalist wusses! And think of the health benefits of all the walking you'll do. We walk up 5 flights (80 steps) everyday when we leave, come home for lunch, have a break, in the evening...who needs an elevator anyway?




You might be impressed by the amount of computers in use in China. Internet cafes are everywhere. You won't be impressed for too long, though, because building code standards are so low that buildings everywhere are already falling apart scant years after they're completed.






One weird thing about China is that even though Mandarin is the official language of the entire country, there are tons of dialects which are incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Especially in the south where we are located, every town has a separate dialect!






The good news is that stuff in China is really cheap! Sure, the quality might not be quite up to the standards you're used to, but you'll get over that. When stuff is this cheap, you can just keep re-buying it every time it falls apart! Neat!







There's lots more surprises waiting for you in China, so come on over! Before long you'll be familiar with the slew of inconveniences inherent to life here. Then you won't be annoyed -- rather, you'll accept them with a smile and chime in with us - "That's China!"

Skype is worth the Hype!

Tim, enjoying a Cabernet at 10degrees in Atlanta before he jumps on his computer and we talk for free!

Okay, so I have to give props and accolades to my brother, Tim. I have been blogging for only a short time but over here in China it is somewhat more difficult to keep up on the newest and coolest gadgets out there.

And Tim, being the techie that he is enlightened me to the power of Skype! Many folks have caught on to this amazing technology, like the Frugal Traveler in the NYTimes.

Skype is free software that gives you the power of making a phone call, with video if you want, over the internet using just your email address. Yes, let me say that again because this is so cool I can't believe it!

Using this free software all you do is type in an email address and when the other person answers, you can talk through your computer (using your computer's microphone) and even use video conferencing if you want - all for free - for as long and as much as you want.

I wish we had this when I was in the Navy and over in Scotland, or Italy, back in the day.

And I am missing you all very much so please download this software, put my email address in and let it find me at sward_2005@hotmail.com, and we will schedule a time to chat on the phone, using your computer.

You can download the free software at www.Skype.com and then send me an email and let's talk!!

Can't wait to chat with you all!

The language of connections...

Ni Hao, Ma? (How are you?)...yep, we are learning more and more Chinese as the days fly by here in our little corner of the Middle Kingdom. I notice that it's been over a week since we have blogged and that is way too long so here are some updates.

The language is becoming easier to understand and I am focusing on learning as much Mandarin as possible in the next few months. I'm glad I waited for a while because time has made a difference in my ability to make associations and listen for the finer pronounciations so learning and understanding is getting easier.

And, it makes a huge difference when I speak just a little Chinese to my students - they really light up and it just cracks them up that their 'white bread' foreign teacher (Laoshi in Mandarin) knows some Chinese. I have lunch with a few students each week, they are showing me the best food in town!, and they are also teaching me Chinese as we discuss the finer things in life in both languages; like fast cars, how to tell a girl she is pretty, and how to name the foods we love in our host language(s). I keep a piece of notepad in my pocket with my week's Chinese and end up referring to it often and it is helping immensely.

I spend about 60% of my freetime thinking and researching ways to create a better 40 minute oral English class for my 1,000 students per week. There is a sea of information on the internet but even that has to be boiled down to effective oral english lessons for large classes and it is a learning process for both me and Jenny. We are also teaching the English Club here at my school so that is a different lesson plan each week and it is an hour and a half for 30 students so the dynamics are very different.

I'm not complaining in the least; I love this job and I love being a teacher much more than I imagined...I wish I had started doing this much earlier in my life.

The other 40% of my time is day to day living here in a city of 3 million where so far, me and Jenny are the only foreigners in the entire city. We hear rumors there are others out there, but like Will Smith in I Am Legend, we have yet to meet or hear or see or even smell any other folks from anywhere but here. We did see a guy who did not look Chinese the other night strolling through a restaurant, but he had a woman who was obviously, er, a 'professional' on his arm so we just couldn't work up the courage to say hello...I guess we will never know if there is other foreign life out there.

However, instead of making us feel isolated and lonely, being the only foreigners among millions of ethnic Chinese is doing just the opposite - our situation is bringing us much closer together both physically and emotionally and I am so happy to say it is doing very powerful things for our relationship.

As many of you know, my experiences in the Navy and traveling around the globe twice prepared me pretty well for a trip like this and the culture shock and alienation can be quite traumatic, but Jenny is not only surviving, she is thriving! I could not imagine this adventure with anybody else but her.

When we aren't researching and preparing lesson plans for class, we are cooking, surfing the net to stay up on current events especially with the important anniversaries coming up here in the Middle Kingdom, playing a little badminton to stay in shape, biking around the town for anything we need, watching the one TV station in English, and watching videos.

Lots and lots of videos.

We have amassed an impressive dvd collection since we got here for several reasons, the main one being there is no English in this city. Imagine - no newspapers, no magazines, no cinema, no junk mail (okay, that's a good thing), no flyers, no billboards, no signs of any kind, no logos on buildings or clothes, or even cars, or storefronts - nothing is in English - there is literally nothing for us to read.

So books as entertainment and education are out of the question, and in fact, there are precious few even in a larger city like Nanjing.

So, videos, specifically packages with entire seasons of television shows are the best bang for our buck - and they are soooo cheap (about $1 - 2.50 each)! We have gobbled up in the last month or two; Season 1 & 2 of Rome (HBO, ), Seasons 1 - 4 of Madmen (AMC), Seasons 1 & 2 of 30 Rock (NBC), and we are currently enthralled with one of the best shows on television, Seasons 1 - 4 of House (Fox).

We have also seen every movie made with Collin Farrell (I especially loved Mann's remake of Miami Vice), along with Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, Jet Li, and we are about to embark on the 100 Oscar Winning Films of All Time (a whopping 16-dvd set for $1.50). That should take us more than a few evenings.

Mindless entertainment, perhaps, but the auditory and visual connections we enjoy through dvd's with our own native language are much more powerful, and enjoyable, than you can imagine unless you have been totally immersed in a completely different culture like this one. Our apartment also has a queen size bed instead of a sofa, so we get quite cozy when we get our time to relax.

Okay, yes, we also realize we are contributing in our own small way to the plethora of multi-media piracy that everyone hears so much about here in China. Duh. This country's main export seems to be knock-off's of everything and anything. So although we haven't yet purposefully sought out the amazing Gucci, Prada, D&G bags and purses yet, we aren't really going to know the difference any way, are we? Would you? You can buy them on the street corner or you can buy them here, we figure we're saving the cost of the middle man.

And I also hear the new copy of MSOffice I just installed could also be a pirated copy so well done that customs experts can not distinguish between the bootlegs and the authentic. But, since I got it from the host at my school I really don't feel the need to complain. In fact, I'm grateful. For both the software and the dvd's. If I only I could get a sweet deal on a big screen plasma.

I guess I'm adapting more easily over here than I expected...:)

The next step is to get some supply channels opened up using the U.S. and Chinese mail systems and we are working on that right now. We are having our address labels printed up in Chinese so you can put a box together for us and just smack the address label on there and it will eventually weave it's way through the red curtain and voila, end up here at our school. Getting boxes out seems to be easy, although they open all mail as usual, it's getting mail to us that is more difficult due to the logistics, not the added security. Plenty of you have volunteered to send us stuff and we really appreciate your largess and we will be in touch soon.

Got to go, it's my turn to wok tonight...we both love and miss you all but damn, we are having a great time over here!

Zie Jian (Good bye!)