Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Foreigner's Medical Exam
One of the girls from the office takes me down to the International Medical Centre to get my exam - you don't make an appointment there, you just show up. We have to stand in one line to get the application form, another to turn in the application form, and another to pay - it is nearly three hundred kuai for this exam, 比较贵 (bi3jiao4 gui4, kind of expensive). The application process takes more than half an hour all by itself. Then we take our form and go to several examination rooms on different floors of the centre for each piece of it. First is a blood test, which feels pretty standard (I don't actually watch), though they don't seem to be taking much blood. Then the urine test, with a plastic container the size of a creamer to pee into that you carry by yourself to the lab. Then blood pressure, height/weight/EKG, ultrasound, and eye/ear test. (I've never had a doctor with one of those actual mirrors on a headband before.) The final step is an X-ray. Each step doesn't take long - I think the ultrasound takes only thirty seconds or so, and the next person is in the room before you are out.
Venturing Out Again
My cold having subsided to a deep hack, I go out to sign my contract today. I need several passport style photos for the visa application so one of the girls from the school's office brings me to a photo shop - small and busy, with three girls working on picture files at large monitors along the right wall and a counter at the back. We go upstairs and the office girl and photographer act much more like they are taking a studio picture, tilting my face and adjusting my hair (note, I am wan and limp-haired from illness). Downstairs, one of the girls at the monitors opens up a very large copy of my picture and evens out my skin, erases the circles under my eyes, and touches up some spots on my face before getting the pictures printed out. I have an appointment for a physical tomorrow which is supposed to take an hour. (I've never had a physical take an hour - what on earth are they going to check?)
My roommate had some cold medicine which is supposed to be for getting rid of heat. OK, TCM stuff, all about the balance of heat and cold in the body. But how do I know if my cold is from too much cold or heat? I do some internet research and conclude that it is a too much cold cold (I have no fever) and therefore I need more heat and should not take the medicine. But, the manager of my school tells me that coughing is from too much heat (maybe I shouldn't have drunk all that heating ginger tea over the past few days) and I should cook a Chinese pear slowly in rock sugar and eat it every day (I think this is a cool thing, not a hot thing). I will give it a try but might be negating the effects with everything else I ate today (chicken noodle soup, some really gummy zhongzi with a bony piece of some kind of bird and egg yolk inside, a greasy fried pork stuffed pancake, and some whiskey with honey and hot water at night, for medicinal purposes.)
There is apparently a shopping festival going on, and a food festival this week too. I am going to check out the food festival as soon as I can smell properly again(maybe Friday or Saturday). Here is a nice smoky smelling booth in the shopping festival area:
Lots of these guys in the central area of town (they are more for short rides, or when you are loaded down with shopping).
Split Pants
Babies are really bundled up here, sometimes thickly enough that their little arms and legs are stuck out from their bodies. The training methods are a bit different though - diapers are not used, and their pants are conveniently split down the middle so they can 'go' anywhere (and they do). A heavily clothed kid with a little round backside in the breeze is a common sight.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
感冒了(gan3mao4 le, sick with a cold)
One of the foreign teachers at a school where I interviewed told me that all foreigners get bad colds and digestive problems when they come. I got both in one day, and am still in the midst of one of the worst colds I've had. 1 day of sore throat, 2 days of runny nose, the coughing started just today - not very fun.
I managed to listen to the Kings game online yesterday without the signal getting too broken up, which was great. (Before, I would get just short punctuated bursts of clear audio, so I would hear something like 'behind the net with the puck!' followed by several minutes of buffering.)
We also have a pretty big stack of movies to pass the time. DVDs can be bought for five or six kuai here (less than a buck), though often they are maddeningly dubbed in Russian. With only one rather silly English TV channel, they are a main source of entertainment. Last night a friend brought over The Holiday and we managed to find the English audio, though it was pretty out of sync with the actors' motions, and then it turned to German halfway through a romantic scene. Talk about a mood killer. We tried turning English subtitles on, but those were literally translated from Chinese: 'you good' for hello, and that was the most easily understood of the lines.
I managed to listen to the Kings game online yesterday without the signal getting too broken up, which was great. (Before, I would get just short punctuated bursts of clear audio, so I would hear something like 'behind the net with the puck!' followed by several minutes of buffering.)
We also have a pretty big stack of movies to pass the time. DVDs can be bought for five or six kuai here (less than a buck), though often they are maddeningly dubbed in Russian. With only one rather silly English TV channel, they are a main source of entertainment. Last night a friend brought over The Holiday and we managed to find the English audio, though it was pretty out of sync with the actors' motions, and then it turned to German halfway through a romantic scene. Talk about a mood killer. We tried turning English subtitles on, but those were literally translated from Chinese: 'you good' for hello, and that was the most easily understood of the lines.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Job Interviews, Jinli Street, the Wooden Bus
Work is something that I would like to get finalized soon. I would really like to get a job at Wal-Mart here, just to learn the names of lots of things, but English teaching is the most accessible, flexible, and well compensated work for foreigners. I have quite a few interviews and one place wants a teaching demo, which I am nervous about but which goes pretty well. They say they are impressed. Only one other place actually asked about teaching ability or qualifications. A few of my interviews remind me of those I've had for working in fast food places: Let me tell you about the work, and when can you start? One of my favourite teaching job websites here has a really helpful guide for gauging how competitive a salary offer will be.
Today we visited Jinli Street:
The usual crowd. Those I used to think of as ‘the wrapped up people' are actually from T*b*t.
Archery practice:
The bus we caught home was made of wood. In Edmonton we think the electric buses from the 60s are way outdated; they are older than me. This bus might be as old as my parents. Check out the controls that the driver is using. (The sign behind his head is instructing passengers not to speak to him; all the buses have that sign.)
Here the driver is fixing the door, which kept sticking open. I'm really relieved that there are fire extinguishers on board.
Today we visited Jinli Street:
The usual crowd. Those I used to think of as ‘the wrapped up people' are actually from T*b*t.
Archery practice:
The bus we caught home was made of wood. In Edmonton we think the electric buses from the 60s are way outdated; they are older than me. This bus might be as old as my parents. Check out the controls that the driver is using. (The sign behind his head is instructing passengers not to speak to him; all the buses have that sign.)
Here the driver is fixing the door, which kept sticking open. I'm really relieved that there are fire extinguishers on board.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Could Have Left My Sunglasses at Home
Was waiting for a sunnier day to take more pictures, but I would have been waiting for a while.
Really wish I’d learned more characters before coming here – being illiterate is not fun. I often maddeningly can work out some really mundane things (ads) while missing the main point of something important (bus directions/schedules). And there are huge gaps in my Chinese vocabulary. Yesterday when I was buying groceries, I didn’t know the protocol of getting your fruit and vegetables weighed and tagged at the back of the store before bringing it to the till at the front of the store, and had no idea what the cashier was trying to tell me. We did eventually find a way to make me understand, so I took my 圣女果 (grape tomatoes) and 四会沙糖桔 (little oranges) about a kilometer to the back of the store for the scale and sticker.
Getting around is becoming a bit easier – a cab fare here is about the same as bus fare at home; buses are one or two kuai and convenient if you are going around the main areas and traveling before eight or so at night. I can’t figure out why some bus rides cost one kuai and some cost two. My roommate fills me in that it costs two kuai to ride the supposedly air conditioned buses. Yes, double the fare for a/c in January.
Spent today on food (6.5 kuai to the dollar): 25 kuai for some not very hot not very chocolate, in a Westerner themed café. 1.5 kuai for some really good dou hua. (The vendor carries two big baskets, one filled with soft fresh tofu and one with fixings. You get a dish of tofu with chili sesame oil, those crunchy beans, chopped green onions, and soy sauce that warms you up from the inside out.) 3 kuai for some spicy fried potatoes at a kind of fast food place (little salty, and could have been fresher, but tingly spicy with Sichuan pepper.) 2 kuai for 2 amazing, freshly grilled xinjiang style lamb skewers. 18 kuai for a zombie lemon tart at starbucks, (pastry about the texture and flavour of particle board) and 12 kuai for tea at same.
Monday, January 22, 2007
City Guide
A real estate company publishes city guides for foreigners that are quite empathetic to the range of challenges waiguoren can experience in China, including culture shock.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Day 2
My second day is devoted to getting to know the city by getting lost and found again. There is a main road down the centre of the city and the hostel is about one third of the way down, so I go off to the left or right of this road (人民路). There is one area, near a temple, that seems to be trying to be like Chang Huang Miao in Shanghai - same type of old fashioned buildings and touristy shops - but less busy. I go into Carrefour (家乐福）which is supposed to sell a lot of western groceries. If they do, I don't notice - I thought I knew quite a bit about Sichuan food, but am astounded by the variety and quantity here. There are enormous displays of pickled vegetables, only a few of which I can identify, huge variety of dried meat snacks, incredibly fresh seafood, and one area set up as a dumpling and Chinese stuffed crepe station.
Lots of the clothes I brought here are not going to be appropriate - I brought a lot of skirts and hardly anything I do here involves dressing up. Maybe I can put them to good use if I get a business English teaching job but meanwhile I am on the lookout for some things to keep the chill off like big socks and a scarf. (Oddly, it always seems colder indoors than outdoors.) I go into department stores to look at boots and am greeted with 光临 (guang1lin2, honored guest) though they still do the downwards gauge-the-customer shoe glance, which I think is universal. I am not rating much since I am wearing greasy hiking boots. I check the fibre content on a scarf and the shop girl rearranges the scarf as soon as I stop touching it, which my friends tell me happens everywhere.
Computer Street, south of the University, is the most amazing place - along this street are three big multistory buildings with floors full of every kind of electronic equipment and very cheap cds and dvds. I could spend hours and hours here. I also go into the Starbucks, which is a pretty authentic Starbucks experience and costs the same as at home. I've been really looking forward to food here, but getting something to eat is a bit intimidating - the few characters I know are not usually enough to figure out what is on the menu. The phrase 什麽 是 最 好 吃（shen2me shi4 zui4 hao3 chi1) serves me very well a couple of times.
Lots of the clothes I brought here are not going to be appropriate - I brought a lot of skirts and hardly anything I do here involves dressing up. Maybe I can put them to good use if I get a business English teaching job but meanwhile I am on the lookout for some things to keep the chill off like big socks and a scarf. (Oddly, it always seems colder indoors than outdoors.) I go into department stores to look at boots and am greeted with 光临 (guang1lin2, honored guest) though they still do the downwards gauge-the-customer shoe glance, which I think is universal. I am not rating much since I am wearing greasy hiking boots. I check the fibre content on a scarf and the shop girl rearranges the scarf as soon as I stop touching it, which my friends tell me happens everywhere.
Computer Street, south of the University, is the most amazing place - along this street are three big multistory buildings with floors full of every kind of electronic equipment and very cheap cds and dvds. I could spend hours and hours here. I also go into the Starbucks, which is a pretty authentic Starbucks experience and costs the same as at home. I've been really looking forward to food here, but getting something to eat is a bit intimidating - the few characters I know are not usually enough to figure out what is on the menu. The phrase 什麽 是 最 好 吃（shen2me shi4 zui4 hao3 chi1) serves me very well a couple of times.
Train Journey
By this time I need to get to the train station - I have nearly a forty hour ride ahead of me. The station is a bit confusing but with my ticket and the expression 我 应该 那里 去 (wo yinggai nàli qù; where should I go) I get to my place. There are three middle aged men in the same compartment, and one of them asks me about where I am from, what I am doing in China, and how much money I am going to make. Then when the train ticket girl is copying down information from my passport, he is leaning over to look at my passport information. A little creepy, but notions of privacy are not the same here. I settle in for the long train ride, and do puzzles and listen to Chinese lessons on my MP3 player. The countryside is a bit desolate looking; not much life in the fields during winter though we do see some of those fields in layers and some neat looking houses carved into the sides of mountains.
My arrival is about 11 am, and I tried to call both my hostel and the friend of a friend here in order to get someone to meet me at the train station. No luck, and I am stuck with a taxi again. Thankfully it is only 8 kuai to the hostel, which is a really neat older building of about three stories with a big open courtyard in the middle. It is a bit rough around the edges though - noisy and messy with renos, and the walls are covered with travel message graffiti. Like many buildings here, it is unheated and there are a couple of little coal pits in the entrance with a few guests, in coats, huddled around mostly playing cards or working on laptops. They have 24 hour hot water though, which steams luxuriously in the six degree air and feels miraculous after the 40 hour train ride. I meet up with friends of friends who live here and we hang out in the afternoon and go out for dinner.
My arrival is about 11 am, and I tried to call both my hostel and the friend of a friend here in order to get someone to meet me at the train station. No luck, and I am stuck with a taxi again. Thankfully it is only 8 kuai to the hostel, which is a really neat older building of about three stories with a big open courtyard in the middle. It is a bit rough around the edges though - noisy and messy with renos, and the walls are covered with travel message graffiti. Like many buildings here, it is unheated and there are a couple of little coal pits in the entrance with a few guests, in coats, huddled around mostly playing cards or working on laptops. They have 24 hour hot water though, which steams luxuriously in the six degree air and feels miraculous after the 40 hour train ride. I meet up with friends of friends who live here and we hang out in the afternoon and go out for dinner.
Shanghai
This long awaited trip begins quite typically – with me being nearly late for the plane. I check in around the time boarding started, and very fortunately the security line is short. The flights pass without many problems, though the airplane food is particularly soul sucking - I ask the flight attendant for a recommendation and he says not to eat it. I have lots of stuff in my ‘busy bag’ – books, crossword puzzles, an MP3 player loaded with Chinese lessons – but opt to watch the onboard movies and save these treats for the train.
Shanghai’s Pudong airport is modern looking and gorgeous – a very nice place to land. I was advised by Wang Jian Shuo’s excellent blog that I could get cash easily there, and also change my Canadian bills. I've been dreading getting a taxi here, since I've heard that in Shanghai you literally have to push other people away – but it is really orderly; I just have to wait in a line. The driver does not understand the address and asked me for a di hua – I have no idea what this means, but it was just a phone number. It cost 115 kuai to get to Jane’s, which is a really beautiful apartment in an area close to a park. Seeing her again is great.
The next day Jane takes me around some of the sights in Shanghai. First thing is a little Xinjiang noodle shop for breakfast. We get bowls of hand pulled noodles for 4 kuai each (about 60 cents). I'd been looking forward to eating Uighur food (from the northwest corner of China) so am pretty happy to do it on the first day. We later go down near the Huangpu river, a great place to see some of the older and newer architecture in downtown Shanghai.
Next stop is Chénghuángmiào, a very neat area with traditional looking architecture and lots of great little shops - touristy, but not suffocatingly so. We also go into some big wholesale buildings nearby. I am really impressed with the fashion sense of Shanghainese women, though am wondering where the look of knickers and tights over high boots is coming from. We eat lots of Shanghai specialties: xiao long bao (soup dumplings), bo cai fan (vegetable rice), and some pan fried pork buns (don't remember Chinese name, but very good.)
By the evening we wander down Nanjing lu, one of the brightest lit streets I've ever seen. We go into a bookstore and I spy a little notebook with Snoopy comics. Snoopy is 史努比 in Chinese which I think is really cute so I want to buy the notebook. However, this is not so simple as paying at the register - the man tells me I have to go back where I got the book and get a ticket. So I return the notebook and get the ticket written, then take it to the cash register to pay. (I'm not allowed to bring the book with me to the cash register.) Then I take the receipt back to the notebook display and collect my notebook. Then, on the way out of the store a man checks the receipt and gives me a bag. Very complicated, and good thing Jane is with me to translate all the steps.
Shanghai’s Pudong airport is modern looking and gorgeous – a very nice place to land. I was advised by Wang Jian Shuo’s excellent blog that I could get cash easily there, and also change my Canadian bills. I've been dreading getting a taxi here, since I've heard that in Shanghai you literally have to push other people away – but it is really orderly; I just have to wait in a line. The driver does not understand the address and asked me for a di hua – I have no idea what this means, but it was just a phone number. It cost 115 kuai to get to Jane’s, which is a really beautiful apartment in an area close to a park. Seeing her again is great.
The next day Jane takes me around some of the sights in Shanghai. First thing is a little Xinjiang noodle shop for breakfast. We get bowls of hand pulled noodles for 4 kuai each (about 60 cents). I'd been looking forward to eating Uighur food (from the northwest corner of China) so am pretty happy to do it on the first day. We later go down near the Huangpu river, a great place to see some of the older and newer architecture in downtown Shanghai.
Next stop is Chénghuángmiào, a very neat area with traditional looking architecture and lots of great little shops - touristy, but not suffocatingly so. We also go into some big wholesale buildings nearby. I am really impressed with the fashion sense of Shanghainese women, though am wondering where the look of knickers and tights over high boots is coming from. We eat lots of Shanghai specialties: xiao long bao (soup dumplings), bo cai fan (vegetable rice), and some pan fried pork buns (don't remember Chinese name, but very good.)
By the evening we wander down Nanjing lu, one of the brightest lit streets I've ever seen. We go into a bookstore and I spy a little notebook with Snoopy comics. Snoopy is 史努比 in Chinese which I think is really cute so I want to buy the notebook. However, this is not so simple as paying at the register - the man tells me I have to go back where I got the book and get a ticket. So I return the notebook and get the ticket written, then take it to the cash register to pay. (I'm not allowed to bring the book with me to the cash register.) Then I take the receipt back to the notebook display and collect my notebook. Then, on the way out of the store a man checks the receipt and gives me a bag. Very complicated, and good thing Jane is with me to translate all the steps.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
