吸管

Oh, and for those of you who are interested, the Chinese word for straw is 吸管 and is pronounced "xīguǎn". I'll have to see if that will work as well for me the sucking sound has. Somehow I doubt it.

创造力. Creativity. Die Kreativität.

According to a recent study, I may just be more creative than you for having lived abroad.

I came across this interesting post in the Economist’s Business Travel blog, Gulliver, a few weeks ago and wanted to share it with you. According to the blog article and the referenced study, living abroad seems to make people more creative.

I can’t say for sure that I’m more creative than you, but I can say that China has made me think outside the box more often when communicating with non-English speakers than I’ve ever have before. For example, every few days or so I decide to treat myself to a soda after school. China is super dirty and as a result, you won’t see me touching the rim of the can to my mouth. Chinese people feel the same way, so every small shop has a bunch of straws for the people who buy canned beverages. Sometimes the straws are located on the counter and I can just take one myself. Other times, however, they are stashed under the glass counter and I have to ask for one. The problem is I don’t know how to say straw in Chinese. I could look it up, but I’ve just never done it. Instead I’ve developed a motion that means straw. I say, “have not have” in Chinese and then hold the can up and make a sucking sound with my mouth. It hasn’t failed me yet. The shop owner always knows that I want a straw. My friend, Caroline, has developed her own system for getting a straw that involves a different hand and mouth motion that also works. There are many many non-verbal ways to get a straw.

I’m not saying this is the most creative thing I’ve ever done, but situations like this one come up on an hourly basis in China. As my time in China is drawing to a close, many of my American friends have begun to talk about what it’ll be like to be back in an English speaking country. In China, I’ve danced around the store to get what I want, baked banana bread in a rice cooker, and used hair bands to fasten countless things closed. In only a few months, none of this will be necessary. How strange it will be to have things I want and to be able to communicate with the public using words! I just hope my creativity doesn’t wane.

The Chew of Hunan

During the first week of orientation in China we were sent on a scavenger hunt all around Changsha. Armed with one group member who spoke Chinese, 100 RMB, and a list of items to find, we were let loose on the unsuspecting public. There were many things on the list that were easy to find: a Chinese flag, a Chinese knot, Beisha beer, KFC ketchup, a picture of a younger Mao, and a business card. There was, however, one thing on the list that no one in my group had the slightest idea what it was. It was something called a betel nut. We searched high and low to find that stupid nut. We tried to translate it into Chinese. We asked countless bystanders if they knew what it was. In the end of the game, we never did find out what a betel nut was.

Now, over nine months since that fateful day, I can barely imagine a time when I didn’t instantly recognize the look and smell of the betel nut. Also called the areca nut, the betel nut is chewed daily by any self-respecting Hunanese male. The nuts are harvested from the areca tree in the tropical pacific, packaged, and sold in large quantities in Taiwan, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Hunan. Oddly enough though, it is rare for betel nut to be found in any other Chinese city out side of Hunan and Taiwan.

The nuts are chewed for their effects as a mild stimulant, causing a hot sensation in the body and slightly heightened alertness. Like chew, betel nut is a carcinogen, which releases its drug through the walls of the mouth. According to Wikipedia, the effect of chewing betel nut is relatively mild and could be compared to drinking a cup of coffee. Betel nuts have created an entire generation of people who have ruined their teeth and gums.

I’m not sure what got into me a few days ago, but I decided to try a betel nut for myself. I figured that since it’s only chewed in this area of China, I will likely never live in a place that chews the nut again. And being relatively exotic, I guess I though it would make a good story. I had heard that the nut was minty and “not delicious,” and I’d have to agree. Though I gave it a good go, I was unsuccessful at chewing the nut to it’s fullest extent due my gag reflex getting in the way. I’m not sad that I tried it, but I’m certain that I’ll never need to do it again.

If you, like me, are interested in trying a betel nut for yourself, let me know and I’ll bring a pack back to America. They are an uncontrolled substance in the states and can be purchased at many Asian grocery stores if you can’t wait that long or mine get taken away by Customs officials.

Zhuzhou from Space

I went on Google Maps to look at Zhuzhou for the first time today. Google's satellite images are really quite amazing and I thought I'd share them with you. It's just too bad that there was some mild cloud cover the day the photos were taken.

Below is a picture of Yandi Square and a portion of the campus of Number 2 Middle School, where I live. The orange arrow is pointing to my apartment building. You can also see the top of the tower that I mentioned in my post on December 20th, 2008 about pollution.



This is an image of the area surrounding Jing Yan Middle School, where I teach. As you may have guessed, the orange arrow points to the school. In the center you can see the "playground" where you've witnessed students "exercising," playing basketball, and putting out fires.

This is a test of the emergency evacuation plan. This is only a test.

During my time in the Hempfield School District we had a fire drill once a month, tornado drills twice a year, and a yearly intruder drill. I imagine the goal was to have all students be prepared for whatever emergency might face us. The one time we did have an actual emergency (a tornado in kindergarten) everyone remained safe the entire time thanks to the hours the district had spent teaching us what to do.

Naturally schools in Hunan want their students to remain safe during an emergency as well. They have, however, adopted a very different system to ensure the students know what to do in the event of a fire or earthquake, like the one that shook Sichuan Province just over one year ago.

The drill at Jingyan Middle School stated with a 45 minute lecture given by some type of school authority and a military official. All 1000 junior 1 students brought their chairs into the “playground” (ie: basketball courts between the academic buildings) to listen to the talk, while the other students “listened” over the loud speaker. At some point during the lecture I heard the soldier say weiguoren several times in quick succession. Meaning foreigner, weiguoren is one of a handful of Chinese words that almost always catches my ear. I asked one of my Chinese friends if he was talking about “my people” and she said that he was telling the students that foreigners know how to deal with emergencies better than Chinese people and that the Chinese should learn from them. As one of the resident foreign experts at Jingyan, perhaps they could have asked if I had anything to add. They didn’t and I would have.

Following the lecture two students were selected from the group to come over to a burning trash wheel-barrel. The school leaders had lit a small fire in the barrel and it was the students’ job to put the fire out with fire extinguishers. After a quick fire extinguisher lesson, the students were let loose on the fire, which they put out with ease.



Next the military representatives brought a gas tank to the stage area and proceeded to set it on fire. A soldier was successful at extinguishing the tank with a wet blanket after about five tries, several of which almost burnt him. Naturally, at this point a student was called up to give it a shot. The student happened to be one of the most outspoken students in class 5, named America. Thankfully, America was far better at putting the fire out than the “expert” and walked away from the demonstration unharmed.



All the students then went back to their classrooms to prepare for the drill portion of the day. A school official somehow produced fake smoke, that I doubt anyone except me actually saw, which signaled the beginning of the drill. A voice came over the loud speaker telling the students to begin coming out of the buildings. Teachers were stationed a different points along the way, yelling at the students to run. And run they did. The students bent low and covered their faces while they ran from the buildings as quickly as possible. They reported to their morning exercise positions in the playground. Many feigned joy at safely escaping the burning building while they waited to be told they could go home for the day. It took only a little over five minutes for all the students and staff to get out of the buildings. Pretty good for over 3,000 people.

I’m not actually sure how prepared the students are. In the case of an actual emergency I imagine several students would be trampled by a stamped of their frightened classmates, while others are injured by burning or flying debris falling from the buildings only feet from where they’re standing. Whatever its faults, I believe the students are better off for having practiced rushing out of the buildings than had the school never run the drill.

Back at Hempfield, students are likely still “quickly walking” out of the buildings during their monthly drills, entirely ignorant of how to put out a burning gas tank. While I have my opinions on who is more prepared for an emergency, I’ll keep them to myself and let you decide on your own.

Yup, They're All Mine

Can you believe all the munchkins within the red box are my students? I barely can!

Diaster in Zhuzhou

Last night Kelly messaged me and asked what I thought “You knew our here has had a bridge to collapse?” meant. Maybe you understand severe Chinglish better than we do, but we both had little idea what the student was trying to say to her. Obviously it was something about a collapsed bridge, but there were still many questions to be answered. We got a few more details from the student, but still were unable to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

This morning my friend Bridget sent me a message about a collapsed bridge in Zhuzhou. Only then did I understand the message from last night. It turns out the first urban flyover in Hunan, which was built in 1995, was located in Zhuzhou. It was 200 meters of this viaduct that collapsed over Hong Qi Square around 4:30pm on Sunday, May 17th. According to the Xinhua News Agency, the death toll has reached nine, with another 17 people still in the hospital. It’s amazing that it wasn’t more. The few times that I visited Hong Qi Square, it was always bustling with hundreds of people walking or driving beneath the bridge at any given moment.

The interested people that we are, Kelly and I went to the site to take a look at the damage this morning. In the bus on the way we saw over 18 military trucks lined along the road, each loaded with an estimated 40-50 soldiers. It appeared that they had just finished up their work and were getting ready to head out after a quick lunch. At the disaster site, a strong police presence was milling around, keeping people out of restricted areas. Apart from the few people who were snapping pictures with and of Kelly and I, the rest of the population hurried past the wreckage, simply going on with their lives. It was surprising how normal everything seemed to be, only 20 hours after the collapse.

This link leads to an article that includes four pictures of the site shortly after the collapse. And this leads to a YouTube video from the AP entitled “Raw Video: Viaduct Bridge Collapses in China”. As you may know, YouTube is blocked in China, so I haven’t been able to view the video myself.

It's For Your Safety

After months and months of fabulous luck, the powers that be have decided to block Blogger for my safety and the safety of the Chinese public. While I appreciate the thought, I’d rather be able to post and edit blog posts without the hassle of being forced to use a proxy server and an image hosting site. Blogger is just one more to fall in a long string of recent blocks. YouTube has been dead to me for several months.

I can’t really complain all that much as the internet has been rather “free” this year. Leading up to the Olympics China unblocked a great many sites for “the benefit of the visitors.” Unfortunately, the rolling block-outs began again during the winter, taking out many websites that are disruptive to the public good and many that are not.

I imagine that the current blockage of Blogger will continue until I leave in a few short months, so I’ll just have to learn to live with the change. Though I am able to post text with relative ease using a proxy, it seems that the proxy cuts out all the frills of Blogger that I’ve grown accustom to. Rather than relying on the makers of Blogger to know all the HTML codes to do things I want, I have to figure them out myself. So far I’ve figured out how to post pictures using an image hosting site and how to add links. Take that Net Nanny!

The New York Times has written some informative articles on this topic over the past few months. Here are the links to two:
China Is Said to Restore Blocks on Web Sites
Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China

May Madness at Jing Yan

The Junior 1 classes are in the midst of a very serious basketball tournament. This tournament is one of the more organized things I’ve seen Jing Yan do and personally, I’m pretty impressed. The students took the tournament to another level by getting NBA or CBA jerseys personalized for the event. I’ll keep you updated on the status of the tournament as things progress.

Be Prepared

I used to joke that I allot over an hour for a 25 minutes commute because I can’t ever been sure that a spaceship won’t land on the bridge I take the get to school. While this is an exaggeration, it isn’t far from the truth. In China, I need to be prepared for absolutely anything to happen.

There are two main reasons for this need. The first is that I can’t read or understand Chinese. A few weeks ago I noticed a piece of paper taped to a wall near my apartment. The other people living in the community all took a quick look at the paper before moving on with their day. All I knew was that obviously it contained some information that I should probably know about. The following Saturday, I woke up and went about my business. I put a load of laundry in my washer and was about to brush my teeth when I realized that my water was off. I called two of my friends who live in the apartment complex. The both confirmed that they too, had no water. From my best guess, the water was turned off from 10:00am-8:00pm. Perhaps the water had been halted for repairs (though I didn’t see any), but in all likelihood, had I been able to read the posted sign a few days before, I would have been aware of the fact that my water supply was going to be cut off for ten hours the following Saturday. Unfortunately, I could not. Luckily this was all not a big problem. It just meant that I had soapy clothes sitting in a washer all day and that I smelled.

The second cause for my cluelessness is that for some reason, Chinese people don’t share information as readily as I might like them to. I have a liaison, named Amy, whose job it is to help me with my life in China and tell me what’s going on at school. It’s not that Amy’s malicious or mean, in fact I really like her a lot and I know that she does the best that she can to help me, but she often doesn’t clue me into to changes to the school schedule or activities going on at school until the last possible minute or at all. A few weeks ago I showed up to school in time to be ready for my 1:45 class. Everything was going normally until at exactly 1:36 Amy told me that the entire afternoon schedule would be pushed back 30 minutes for the rest of the school year. Rather than having 10 minutes until my class began, I had 40. (Better that I was too early than too late, I guess).

10 minutes warning was actually not all that bad. Just yesterday I asked Amy if there was anything I should know about this week. She said that nothing at all special was going on this week. Only a short while later I found out that in fact there was something special going on that very afternoon. My students let me know that they would be competing in a basketball tournament starting during the 8th period. 2 hours since I asked, 1 thing it might have been nice to tell Ashley. This morning I woke up to find out that today is the anniversary of Sichuan earthquake the killed hundreds of students last year. At 2:28pm there was to be a moment of silence to remember all those who lost their lives. 22 hours since I asked, 2 things it might have been nice to tell Ashley. We’re at about 36 hours since I spoke to Amy about this week’s schedule. We’ll have to wait and see how many more things will end up surprising me.

After almost 10 months in China, these things hardly bother me anymore. I’ve gotten completely used to having little to no warning. If I ever get asked in an interview if I’m a flexible person, I’ll just have to answer that I’ve had a year of full time flexibility training and wouldn’t have a problem working around a spaceship in the office.

Welcome Summer!

Yep, that was the actual temperature at 19:18:29 today, May 10th, 2009. Let me assure you that it was much hotter in the afternoon when the sun was actually out. It's so hot, the weather widget felt that it needed to add the little cactus to help all of you understand just how hot it feels when you add 90% humidity into the mix. I guess this is just pay back for all the times I wished for warmth during the winter.

Wedding Shots

Here's the link for an album of pictures from the wedding. You know the deal. Enjoy!

A Traditional Chinese Wedding!

A Traditional Wedding

A few years ago I watched a show on HGTV about a western couple who paired up with an Indian-American couple to plan a traditional Indian wedding. The Indian-American couple had recently got married themselves, so they were able to walk the American couple through the wedding process. They helped them pick out saris, get the bride’s hands hennaed, and plan the procession. At the time I thought the idea was kind of cool, but something that I would never do.

This past weekend I attended a traditional Chinese wedding in Zhuzhou. A friend of a friend’s cousin was getting married and some how the invitation got passed down the line to me. I had close to no idea what I was getting myself into when I went to Shen Long Park on Saturday morning at 8:00 am to meet Katie, our Chinese friend.

In typical Chinese fashion, we all waited along side the road for the wedding procession to appear. The group was made up of a band of traditional Chinese instruments, the groom on a horse, and a group of men carrying a sedan chair. Everyone was dressed in red and yellow clothing. After taking a number of pictures, we joined the procession and walked to the bride’s house to pick her up. No Chinese event is complete without fireworks, so a number were set off. At this point the groom entered the bride’s house to meet her for the “first time”. (Although this was a traditional wedding ceremony, courtship and engagement, were not. Apparently the couple had been dating for several years.) The groom led the bride out of the house with a red rope and she got into her sedan chair. We then processed with the bride and groom to the groom’s family’s house.

Once we got to the second home, the bride and groom went into the house, while the guests waited in front. There was a drum show and then a dragon dancing show for the guests to enjoy while the couple and a few close family members changed their clothes and took a rest in the house.

At some point after this, Katie told us that the wedding was over. It was incredibly interesting to watching this ancient ceremony take place. There was no exchanging of rings or wedding vows. The act of picking up the bride at her house and transporting her to her new home served the same purpose that the ring and I dos do in western weddings.

Years ago, when I watched that show on HGTV, I thought that I would never want to have a traditional wedding from another culture that my husband and I don’t belong to. I thought about all the western couple was giving up; the white dress, the church ceremony, the white cake. After going to this Chinese wedding, the idea seems a lot more interesting. I guess I’ve just started to think about all the cool things you gain; in site into another culture, an amazing story, the ability to open your guest’s eyes to something new. It could be something I want to look into when it’s my turn to get married. I just need to find a husband first.