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.

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.

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.

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.

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.