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!)