Shanghai

The weekend began with my first bullet train experience. Travelling at a break-neck (break-everything) land speed of about 200mph, but with a great deal of comfort. You almost don’t feel like you are even on a moving missile. The total time from Nanjing to Shanghai, with two stops on the way, was only about 90 minutes. The return journey was 70 minutes, non-stop.

I am so thoroughly impressed by this city. It’s not quite a Western city, but it’s darn close. The streets are so much cleaner than anywhere I’ve been in Asia, the drivers are actually polite and do not honk at pedestrians, the buildings were very Western in style and appearance, and the city was well-planned and designed with nature in mind. That being said, it is a very huge, very busy, and very crowded city. I was there over a holiday weekend, which meant the city was fairly empty because many people traveled to their hometowns outside the city. But to a foreigner, who has been in China for only two weeks, the city looked pretty full to me!

After arriving, we did some brief touring to get a feel for the city, then checked into our hotel. After this, we headed straight to dinner: a Mexican restaurant. Hey, living in Asia, you start to miss some good foods from home, and Anthony had been talking up this restaurant and their guacamole nachos all week. He was right, they were delicious. The restaurant also sparked an agreement to have a guacamole “cook-off” sometime in the near future to see who has the best homemade stuff! From there, we took a cab to the foreign shopping center for some much needed cooking ingredients. I also bought a cone of chocolate ice cream from Denmark. Delicious! The Copenhagen label on it reminded me of the two days I spent in Copenhagen with my sista back in May. Great memories! Before retiring for the evening, we went to a massage shop and were each treated to a one hour foot rub. That’s good living!

Day Two: We met up with a local from Shanghai, JoAnn, who is a friend of Anthony’s. JoAnn showed us the old city, where we could view lots of traditional building structures and fight through plenty of crowded alleys!

The morning featured several traditional Chinese treats, including dumplings (popular everywhere) and stinky tofu (very popular in Taiwan. The real test of the day was “haggle” shopping at the fake markets. Named such because this is where you can buy iPod look-alikes, designer jackets, bags, Rolex watches, etc., at basement bargain prices, and you aren’t sure if they’re actually the real product that has “disappeared” from warehouses here, but you definitely think the quality is close, but probably not real…We had fun going back and forth on different price offerings for souvenir items and more.

After the shopping experience, we went back to the heart of downtown. We took a fast elevator to the 91 floor of the largest building in Shanghai, and from here, were given the full view of just how big the city really is. Massive. We ended the day by visiting a large temple downtown, that is a pretty major tourist attraction. After some naps at the hotel, we were back out for food. This time, JoAnn would not let us eat Mexican food, reminding us all that we needed to try Shanghai food. I’m glad she did! Each province, and further, each city, has its own style of cooking food and has its own special dishes and flavors. From my one experience at the Shanghai restaurant, their variety of flavor sure is good! I plan on eating more food like this whenever I can find it. We ate fish, different vegetables including some Chinese varieties I had not tried before (lotus root), pork, some kind of game bird, and of course, dumplings!

Day Three: Anthony and JoAnn left for a trip to Hong Kong, so Paul and I took a “hop on, hop off” tour of the city, sitting on top the open second deck of the double-decker whenever the seats were available. The city tour took us to several locations: Yu Yuan Garden (pretty, but super crowded), the Shanghai Old City Wall (seen only from the bus), the Bund (the picturesque skyline of the Chinese Wall Street), and the site of the First National Congress of Chinese Communist Party. The trip was full of information and history. We saw interesting buildings, historical structures and pictures, etc.

My impression of the city is thus: too many people, but well designed and planned to tightly fit them together. Shanghai is hustle and bustle to the ‘t’ and it shows. The people have a very different attitude and behave differently in public than the rest of China (so I’m told), but I like that. The presence of nature is lacking compared to Nanjing, and based on my short time there versus my time in Nanjing, I’m liable to be much more comfortable where I am now!

By 1pm, we were back at the train station and waiting for our bullet trains out of the city. It was  a very nice short trip to explore and I look forward to returning to Shanghai in October.

City Sights

Spent the weekend getting familiar with the bus and subway lines going to and from some of the historical sites. On Saturday, my new roomie, Paul, and I went to the Nanjing Massacre Museum. This museum was dedicated to the memory of over 300,000 Chinese who were massacred by Japanese soldiers during WWII.  About half of those killed were women and children. The images and story of the massacre were utterly depressing, to say the least. However, I was very appreciative of the overall message and theme throughout the museum: this tragic piece of history must be remembered and always associated with the horrors of war, so that our future is focused on working towards the unifying power of peace.

We left the museum and saw another, different museum right across the street. This was an unexpected stop, but it was still afternoon and not much else on the agenda for the day, so we went in. Turns out, this museum was for silk brocade. Apparently, my new city is famous for the production of these silk brocades and has been famous for several centuries. There were many lovely displays of the fabric in different stages of development. At the end of the museum, there was a large room where real, giant looms were set up and in full operation, which is a two-person job. It was impressive to see the two artisans at work: one seated in a chair, bent over the fabric, continually making adjustments, the other seated on top of the machine, about ten feet in the air to feed the fabric. The entire machine was about thirty feet long; it was a beast of a wooden machine!

Unfortunately, neither museum allowed photographs inside. This was appropriate and should be the rule for the massacre museum, out of respect for the dead and tragic history. But I would have loved some photos and video of the looms in production!

The New Job

The job situation is very different from what I experienced in Thailand. First, the students. Before, I had been teaching middle school and high school students. Now, I have elementary. They are a lot cuter! The class sizes are much smaller too, which allows me to focus attention and to be sure each student is learning. In Thailand, I struggled to manage class sizes of fifty; in Nanjing, my classes do not get any larger than ten students.

Another major difference and something that will take some time for me to get used to: my job as a substitute for good parenting / discipline instruction for these students. Why, you ask? Allow me to explain a well-documented side effect of the one-child policy. The typical Chinese child grows up at the center of the household where both sets of grandparents live in the same house (or nearby and stay-over for babysitting often). The policy was enacted in 1979 which, when you do the math, means many young adult parents in their late 20s and early 30s were born post-policy, meaning each parent is also an only child. Since many of these families are two generations of no siblings, the young kids today are the apple of the parents and grandparent’s eyes. I mean, the child is both sets of grandparents only grandchild! You better believe that kid is spoiled, always gets attention when they want it, and they run the household. This is so well-understood here that the kids are called “little emperors and empresses,” and this is only said partly tongue-in-cheek. The first few weeks of class are a difficult adjustment period for the students who now have to share the spotlight with other kids, on top of being separated from family. So in addition to teaching English, my role is also to teach good focus habits, manners, and how to deal with not getting their way, all the time. Another difference: since my new company is Western run and a private company, things actually get done and my inputs are well-received. The government school in Thailand was bogged down in paperwork procedures, getting signatures: basically the feared Vogon bureaucrats from “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

My school, being a private company, is interested in growing and providing our program to more students. My HR manager, Anthony, is in charge of the hiring of new teachers as we grow, as well as arranging their accommodations, guides in the city, and airport pickup. Management has asked me to be in charge of the marketing. I bring in the students so Anthony can hire more teachers! I’m hoping some of my friends in America will be looking into teaching abroad when my school starts hiring (hint, hint).

The Chinese assistant teachers here are wonderful. They are so sweet and helpful. Altogether, there are twelve ladies who help us out in the classroom and around the office. Most of them have just graduated from university and are now working their very first job. So we have some major training to conduct with them, which is at times a shell-shock for the Chinese to be so quickly baptized in the Western fires of the workplace…but they take the on-the-job training in stride and they are improving. This week, I’ll be conducting a sales training course for them. In addition to running the office, producing our teaching materials, helping discipline in class, and everything else the Chinese teachers do, they are always happy to order food for me and the foreigners, since we don’t understand the menus! They show us different options and the food is usually delivered to our building within thirty minutes. What’s more, the Chinese teachers also serve as our friendly tour guides around the city for errands and shopping needs. All in all, I think we have a great team! I must say, this job is a great fit for me.

Here is a picture of one of our colorful classrooms with chef Anthony serving up some delicious options!

Hello Nanjing

It’s only been my first day in Nanjing, China, but stepping outside—whether I am leaving my apartment, work, or a store—I am immediately made aware of the fact that I am not in smelly Samutsakhon, Thailand anymore. The air here, while polluted, is not caked with the smell of sewers or fish factory effluent. Furthermore, the air is not hot! (later correction: the air is very hot and humid in summer) It has been a very chilly 24 hours in my new city, as autumn begins to take root. In fact, the weather is cold enough that I’ll soon be asking my parents to stuff some sweaters into the care package to be sent! Winter is around the corner and I can expect to see some snow.

My new manager, Anthony, picked me up at the airport. Anthony is from Vancouver but has citizenship in the U.S. as well. Before China, he worked as a chef, so I may have a new cooking partner and someone to learn from! Anthony has been in China for three and a half years and he is already fluent in Mandarin. This is inspirational for me as I begin my studies of the language. He says he will find me a language tutor to help my studies along. As our taxi left the airport, I couldn’t help but notice cameras that took pictures of the cars on the freeway. Anthony explained that security is insanely tight in Nanjing. “If we were to steal something at the airport,” he said, “the cameras inside would have tracked us to this taxi, the photos over us would track the car all the way to where we exit, and police would be waiting.” Basically, Nanjing is one of the safest cities in Asia, he explained. Secure and safe, sounds good to me!

The roads throughout my new city are a huge improvement over every road I ever traveled in Thailand. To go from the pot-hole riddled roads of Thailand, with uneven bumps every few kilometers, to these smooth, well-maintained roads…it felt like the taxi was driving on the surface of a marshmallow!

The taxi dropped us at the office building of my new school. The school is located on the 7^th floor. The decoration, materials and equipment, the look and feel of my school, the atmosphere, everything combined in a way that very much reminded me of my mother’s kindergarten classroom. Most of the students that I will work with are between the ages of 3 and 8, but we do teach older students as well. This is a private language school, opened on weekends and after normal school day hours, in the afternoons and evenings. That means I will have mornings free to exercise, write, and explore the area. The school is always closed on Mondays and, hey, I’m ok with not working on Mondays!

I met my real bosses, Jasmina, who is an American and fellow alumni of Metropolitan State College of Denver (although she is originally from Virginia), and Steven, who is Chinese. Everyone seems very friendly and supportive. They are all interested in the success and growth of the school. I think we will all make a great team! I gave the staff some dried mangos and other dried fruits from Thailand as a welcome gift. Just something else I picked up from Thai culture.

Then I met my roommate: Paul from Texas. Paul is a Korean-American who grew tired of university and decided it was time for a change. At the moment, Paul is only here on a four month internship, but he may stick around as an employee after. He is also studying Mandarin Chinese so we can practice together.

My second-floor apartment is great! Not only do I have a real bed (goodbye floor mat!), but it’s a fairly comfortable double bed with a head board! I also have a nice couch, a chair, and a sizeable dresser, as well as two small dresser drawers. Oh, and don’t forget the desk, which is a perfect work and writing space. The desk faces out to the enclosed balcony that holds my washing machine and some storage cabinets. The bathroom features a western toilet and hot shower (thank you Buddha). The kitchen has two stove top burners. Talk about improvements in efficiency—I was used to cooking everything with one stove top in Thailand! I have a nice refrigerator and a freezer, and plenty of cabinets to store cereals, cooking items, etc. There is also a small breakfast table with two chairs. I am very appreciative of not having bugs and lizards in my apartment, because they were frequent guests in my Thai home! The neighborhood is also very nice. I found a place down the street where I can buy big bottles of drinking water. Trees are in steady supply, and there is a nice playground where I saw a lot of adults stretching and working out with the equipment.

(yes, that is my pink bed sheet)

The next morning, Paul took me around to a few of the places he has discovered. We had a pretty tasty lamb ‘pancake’ for breakfast. Different type of pancake than what I was enjoying in Thailand or would enjoy in America, but it was tasty. Then he showed me Citizen’s Park where we watched small groups of elder Chinese people practicing tai chi. The next stop was the neighborhood grocery store. I turned this into a preliminary scouting mission and made notes about what I could come back for to fill up the fridge. I bought some raw yogurt, ate it, and thought about my dad and twin bro who get to enjoy raw dairy every day. I also bought some Skippy peanut butter, and on the way back to the apartment, Paul took me into a nice bakery to get a good loaf of wheat bread.

We visited the Nanjing University campus which was very impressive. The campus grounds were well maintained and had beautiful greenery’s. If it wasn’t for distinct Chinese statues, Chinese letters on the building placards, I might think it was a college campus back in America.

The rest of the day was spent running errands with my manager, Anthony. We went to another, bigger grocery store for some other food items and to buy me a water bottle. Then we went back to the subway station to get me a sub card, that way I don’t have to fumble for change whenever I travel. We opened up a bank account and changed over my USD to RMB (Chinese Yuan). I had changed my THB (Thai Baht) to USD at the aiport to make the transfer easier when I arrived.

Anthony invited us up to his 42^nd floor apartment for dinner. He cooked a “simple meal,” he said, which featured three different Chinese dishes and a Chinese soup. It did not look or taste simple to me! He is a very good cook! After dinner, Paul showed me the nearby internet café and I sent some folks back home a quick email or two. By this time, it was about 9:30pm and my body was getting tired. I went back to the apartment, read a bit, and then hit the hay. Tomorrow will be my first day of teacher training at my new school!

Security, security, security. I saw a few police officers walking around the park, the downtown streets, and I even located a small police office/station in my neighborhood. Tomorrow, I have to fill out some paper work and go register with the police. All foreigners living in China must register within 24 hours of arriving. The police want to know our address and what we’re doing here. Yes, it feels like they’re keeping tabs, but I am also OK with the police knowing where I am from the standpoint of my safety.

Here's a picture of the tallest building in my city, the Intercontinental Hotel, which is one of the tallest in China. It's a very useful landmark!