Thoughts on Being a Miniature Celebrity

Howdy folks, Ben speaking. For those of you who don't know, Mallory and I have had a few computer troubles over the past few weeks. As in, the computer went six feet under and our internet connection was moving slower than a geriatric turtle. But thanks to some great friends, some ingenious Chinese students, and a few thousand kuai, we're back online faster than ever!

A few things to catch you up on. First, people tend to stare around here. By that I mean, everyone stares and everything I do. And I partially understand. For many people in Kaifeng, I am the first non-Chinese person they've seen in their entire lives. They've heard about America every day, and then America just walks by. Most of the time, I don't mind the attention. But on days like today, it's about all I can manage not to smack someone. You see, I teach almost every morning. I teach two classes in two hour blocks, and I do the same lecture in both classes because I go around to different classes every day. So, I have different people every day and need to consistently deliver my lecture so they can practice their listening skills. [Remember: never seen a foreigner. So many students studying English have never heard a native speaker in person either.] Now, imagine talking at about one eighth of the speed you normally talk for four hours every morning. Pretty tiring...

This morning, one guy came up after class and asked if he could take a picture with me. "Sure," I said. What could be the harm? I'm sure this would make the guy's day. After the first picture, someone else comes up and asks for the same thing. Ten seconds later, I'm surrounded by people pushing and pulling each other [and pushing and pulling me] to get a picture. It wasn't like being an animal in a zoo. It was like being an animal on the chopping block. Eventually, I shook them off, gave them a few firm English phrases, put on my 'Don't bother me' face, and everything was good. For those few seconds though, I was livid.

Enough negative though. Things are just swell around here. The National Day holiday starts in a few days. For some reason National Day [the day the PRC started] lasts for an entire week. So that means a full week and a half of no classes for us. We're preparing for some serious rest, a bit of nesting, and a lot of TV shows in bed.

Now I'll leave you with a few pictures we've taken over the last month that we haven't been able to share. Enjoy! More to come!

 

 

Noodles and beer. What a mix!

A shot of the street outside of the second floor of a Chinese pizza place. Yep, Chinese pizza...

The Iron Pagoda, the campus attraction.

A full bus is a happy bus.

Never a day without something interesting...

Let's see... How to begin this post? First, I can say to you that not a single day passes here without some crazy surprise, whether revolting, hysterical, or just plain funky. Here are a few from our past week.

Nearly every day, Ben and I eat lunch together at a little fan-guar, or meal-place, outside the south gate of the university. The other day, we went with Adam and Eaaf (yes, Eaaf) to a place we had been to several times before. Well, I can say with confidence that I will never go there again. Right about the time everyone had finished eating, Eaaf put down her chopsticks and said, "That's it. I'm done." First, I thought she was just announcing to the table that she had had her fill, but no. In the midst of her white rice...was a worm. A worm. If we had been in the States, um, lawsuit! It was absolutely disgusting. I know I shouldn't have been as grossed out as I was (I am in B. F. China after all), but I wanted to go yell at someone about health code violations. Oh, wait, there are none.

Next story. Yesterday, the International Affairs Office took all of us wai-go-ren (white folk) to Zhengzhou to visit the Yellow River Park and the Henan Museum. At the park we climbed a mountain, took some pictures, yadda yadda (actually it was pretty cool but I'll just share pictures later). Then, we went down to the river and had lunch in a boat, where I experienced my first quad-language meal. At our table, we had four Americans, one Russian, and to Japanese people. The other two Americans communicated with the Japanese couple in Japanese and with the Russian in Chinese and with us in English. I learned how to say hello, or was it thank you?..., in Russian. It sounds like ztrasvoychen. And Tatyana learned to say "I like drink tea" and "I eat fish" in English. Success. Meanwhile, there was some eating going on. The first course (dun dun dunnnnn) was a plate of tiny little fried WHOLE fish! Funky. I ate a couple. They weren't as bad as I thought, but I still couldn't bring myself to eat the head. I miss salmon filets; no bones, no eyes, no funk.

Anecdote numero tres. This one is short. Today, I had lunch with three of my students. They are incredibly sweet girls, each of whom brought me a present. When we arrived at the restaurant, one of them asked me, "Do you like eat packets?" I'm thinking... "Not usually..." We had these yummy soup-filled baozi (which are a variation of dumplings. They translated the name to "Irrigation soup packets." Ha!!!!! Doesn't that sound delicious? Well it was. Got to go. Kisses from Mal!

"In Christ alone my hope is found; He is my rock, my strength, my song."

Sorry we have been absent for so long. We have had serious computer problems and could not get a blog post up for several days. This is Mallory speaking. :)

Classes have been going well, for the most part. My nursing students really seem to love me, which still shocks me. Mom was joking a couple of weeks ago, when I told her about the ladies who clean our rooms and take out our trash, and how we eat out for every meal; she said, "You won't be fit for shit when you get back." Sorry to the grandmothers reading this, but the rhyme is too good to re-word. Not to mention the fact that every day I have someone telling me that I am beautiful. When I enter a room, students glow with delight to see me. Some of them even jump up and down when they see me coming. We've had people paying for our meals and our taxis, even though we make a lot more money than they do. In a strange way, it is like we are celebrities here.

I can see how Mom or anyone else might think all this special attention would make me useless. But the truth is, it hurts. A lot.

When I come back from a class or meeting with my students, I feel heavy inside. Rather than giving me a big head, my position is proving to be the biggest burden I have ever carried. All I can think is, Who am I? Who am I that you should adore me so? I am not special; I'm not even really a teacher. I'm only two years older than my students. This is truly the most humbling experience of my life.

I'm doing my best here. Every time I leave a classroom, I'm exhausted because I've given everything I have to these students. But it doesn't seem like enough. Not nearly. The way they look at me, they deserve so much more than me. But I'm the one who is here. I just hope that I will not fail them.

Location:Kaifeng, China

Moon Cakes, Foreign Food, and a Town Called Zhengzhou

I never want to eat another Moon Cake for the rest of my life.

But first, let me explain. You see, traditionally the Chinese celebrated the harvest and the autumn moon with a mid-autumn festival. During this festival, they go home to their families and eat what they call Moon Cakes. If you were to see a Moon Cake in the States, you would think, "Oh, that must be filled with something sweet--maybe fruit, or caramel, or chocolate." But oh how wrong you would be...

You see, the Chinese have different taste buds than we have in the States. They don't like sweetness as much as we do. So when they make Moon Cakes, which look very much like a very fancy Little Debbie cake, they fill them with not so sweet things. Sometimes they fill them with fruit. Sometimes... Other times they decide that making a paste that tastes like a plate of rice and meat would be wonderfully appetizing. Other times they meet halfway and mix sweetness with meat with nuts with seeds. You can imagine the concoctions we have discovered.

It is also tradition at the mid-autumn festival to give Moon Cakes to friends and family. And since we are new here and plenty of people want to welcome us to the neighborhood, we've gotten our share. We've gotten about 20 of the blasted things so far. A handful have been very tasty. Many more have been questionable. The one thing we learned from this was that you should never blindly bite into what looks like a dessert in China.

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On a more interesting topic, Mallory and I took a trip with two other teachers to the capital city of Henan province, Zhengzhou [pronounced jung-joe]. One teacher who was here last year told us that there were many Western food stores in Zhenzgzhou and that we could probably buy cereal there. He was right about buying cereal. It certainly was there. It also costs about $7-8 a box. That's around 40-50 yuan per box. Consider that we can buy dinner for the both of us at a local restaurant for less than 15 yuan and you'll quickly see why we bought no cereal in Zhengzhou. We did however get a good deal on some mozzarella and pizza sauce, so all the foreign teachers will be having homemade pizza soon.

Also, another item of interest: Zhengzhou is big. Like, New York City big. We waited at one of the bus stops in the city for about 20 minutes because we could not find a bus to fit on. Literally, there were people crammed into the bus right up to the front door. There were floods of bikes in places, all fighting to get past the rows and rows of cars going the other direction. Our little escapade really made us appreciate the "small town" of Kaifeng. Now this place seems like a peaceful little village to us.

From moon cakes to big cities, keep in mind: It's all about perspective.

Chinese Jenga, Big Brother Cake, and a Happy Dance!

Hello, USA. This is Mallory speaking.

So, for the past three to four days, I've been downright sick and have been bundled up in our apartment trying to recover. Last night, though I was still feeling crummy, I decided I could get myself out of pajamas if it meant I could eat pizza. And I did. Ben and I got into a rickshaw with two other English teachers and made our way to Gu Lo, or Kaifeng's downtown. I was absolutely beside myself with hunger and excitement that I wouldn't have to eat something served over rice. At about 7:20, we ordered one large pepperoni and one large Hawaiian pizzas. Little Ben (as he has been dubbed because he is so much shorter than my Big Ben) found a game of Jenga in the restaurant, oh excuse me, I mean Folds High Wooden Toy, which we played for the next hour while we were waiting for our food. Granted, playing this sort of Chinese Zodiac Jenga was very amusing, but nothing compares to the joy we found in reading the box. On it, we discovered priceless mishaps of Google translate, such as, "While listen attentively to the natural rhythms, lets the baby know the basic scale," which is related to the game in no way whatsoever. Then, all four of us were holding our stomachs in laughter at this little beauty, listed under the Caution section: "Place toy in mouth to prevent chidren (sic)." Once we had calmed down, our pizzas finally arrived, and they were actually delicious. Crunch crust, warm cheese,... fruit cocktail????? Seriously, instead of having ham and pineapple on our Hawaiian, we had ham and drained fruit cocktail. Yes, there was pineapple, but there was also pear, peach, and cherry pieces on every slice. I am so in China.

This morning, my stomach told me that it was not ready to handle anything from a street vendor, so I chose instead to get a muffin for breakfast from this chain bakery called Gege Cake, or in English, Big Brother Cake. Ben and I got a few items to sample, because really, when it's six yuan to the dollar, why not? The rundown: what I thought was chocolate cake was in fact prune cake, still tasty but I don't understand why they like prunes so much; the cookie tasted like angel food cake, so okay there; my lemon muffin was very satisfying if not slightly on the dense side (darn that milk-that-doesn't-need-to-be-refrigerated-and-is-sold-in-pouches). We still have one pastry left to try that looks yummy but will most likely taste nothing like we expect. That's what you get with the food here. Never thought I'd be so grateful to have a McDonald's close by.

And the final bullet point of this post is... Our bag finally came! For those of you who don't know, we somehow managed to lose the bag with all my medicine and contact lenses on the plane from Atlanta to Tokyo and have had a hell of a time trying to get it back. Well, it finally arrived in the mail today. Ergo, the happy dance. :D

Love you America!

Spectacles All Around

It's been an interesting two days, and the number of surprising sights I see per day is rising steadily. Yesterday me and two of the other English teachers decided to go out and get some breakfast together. That normally involves walking to the West Gate [Xi Men] of the campus and going to one of the food stands for fried vegetables in a pita or something similar. I've noticed that the Chinese don't mild, sweet breakfasts like Americans do (cold cereal with milk would not be appetizing to them). After we got our food, we walked back towards the East Gate, where my and Mallory's apartment is. On our way, we encountered a group of men in similar uniforms marching around the sidewalk together chanting. We had no idea who they were or what they were doing.

After they had marched around for about a minute, we heard the noise of more people in uniforms behind us. Another group in different colored outfits came out of a shop right next to us and started doing the same thing. Turns out, these were both hair salons! Apparently every morning the entire staff of both places comes out and competes to see who can yell and march the best, in order to win customers. I took video of most of it, and trust me, it was quite a sight!

Later that day, we were relaxing around campus when the wife of one of the groundskeepers came out with a strange contraption. It looked like a spinning top a bit bigger than a softball. She had two sticks in her hand with a string connecting them, and she would spin the top on the string, which made a whirring noise like a UFO. After she did that for a while, she started doing tricks with it, tossing it from stick to stick (still spinning!), tossing it under her legs, and throwing it in circles around herself! She even taught one of the English teachers how to do it, though it took him quite a while to even keep it spinning, let alone do any tricks with it.

The Chinese are not the only ones providing spectacles, though. Most Chinese have never seen a foreigner in their lives, and coming to university is their first chance to see one and practice the English they've learned. They've also never seen many things that we take for granted, like a frisbee. You heard me right: most Chinese have never even seen a frisbee on TV before. When I and two of the other English teachers went out to play, it was quite a sight to behold! Usually when we play, a crowd of about 15 to 20 people gathers to watch us throw it around. One guy with a very expensive camera even stopped and started taking action shots of us! He seemed very taken with my ability to reach a frisbee flying about 9 feet off the ground.

It looks like these ten months will be full of surprising sights for everyone involved!

P.S. If you ever get the chance to try doujiang (pronounced dough-jahng), I'd advise you not to do it unless you're ready to have your mind blown. Doujiang literally translates to "bean juice." It's ground up soybeans mixed with water, warmed up, and frothed like a latte. And it tastes exactly how it sounds...

Home Sweet Hotel Room

As some of you know, Ben and I got these jobs here in Kaifeng via our connection with Dr. Carolyn Dirksen, who taught at this same university back in the eighties. When she and her husband were here, they lived in the building referred to as the Foreign Experts Residence. This is where Ben and I expected to be living when we got here, but, because A. there were not enough apartments for everyone and B. we are married, we have the luxury of lodging in an on-campus hotel. Ours is a much newer (and honestly, much nicer) building, with most of the comforts of home, minus a decent mattress. When you walk through the door, the first thing you see is...yourself! There's a large mirror with a small cabinet for our shoes. Behind this is our kitchen, which consists of a few cabinets, small counters, a sink, and a hot plate and microwave/oven/grill, courtesy of the International Affairs Office.

Our living room is really quite spacious. They've given us a sofa and comfy chair with cushions that are much softer than our bed. :P We also have a coffee table, where we eat our breakfast every morning...yummy egg and veggie pita... Plus, we have a sweet flatscreen tv! There is a channel that plays English language movies, which is great and highly entertaining, seeing as I'll never get to know what movie I could be watching at any given moment. Today, I've caught snippets of Princess Diaries 2, Goodfellas, and Zodiac. Finally, we have the wonderful air conditioner and fridge. The AC is covered in Chinese, so I just push the + and - buttons to change the temperature, which is measured in Celsius, of course. Our fridge is about the size of the one I had in my dorm room with the added freezer on the bottom, and, like almost everything else in China, it has a funky smell. We're working on finding some baking soda.

In our boudoir, you will find the cement block, I mean bed, a wardrobe, two bedside tables, and a desk (on which I am typing this very blog post). I get first dibs on the desk because I'm actually teaching a couple of classes with grades and stuff (explanation to come later). There's really not much to tell about this room other than we like it and have been spending a ridiculous amount of time in here the past few days since we've been sleeping more than we've been awake.

And, of course, I've saved the best for last... our bathroom! First thing on the left is our sink, then comes the itty bitty, but greatly appreciated, washing machine, followed by the Western (hallelujah!) toilet, ending with the "shower." We don't actually have a shower. There's just some extra space on the other side of the toilet with a shower head above and a drain on the floor. So, the whole bathroom floor is wet for the majority of everyday, but, truth be told, showering is a lot more entertaining than it has ever been.

So far, our apartment has proven to be quite the safe haven for us. Plus, I change into pajama pants right when I come through the door, so I think, in time, it will start to feel like our home.

Oh, and all our floors are tile. Cold feet! And lots of sweeping (thanks, Ben!).

:)

Hell and High Water Into the World (a road sign describing a new apt. building)... You can't make this stuff up

So, we've been in Kaifeng for a few days now, and plenty of interesting stuff has happened, most of which is currently catalogued in our minds for future sharing. But right now, I just can't archive the experience of our morning at the Zhengzhou hospital.

All the foreign language teachers (meaning the six English teachers and one Russian teacher who does not speak English) packed into a bus and headed down the Zheng Kai Road, literally the road connecting Zhengzhou and Kaifeng. In China, there is no need for a car radio, because as long as you are on the road, you are serenaded by the sounds of people honking at you from every direction. Traffic laws mean absolutely nothing here. Everyone is so impatient, and whenever you feel like it, apparently, you can cross the double yellow lines to pass the moron in front of you who just isn't going fast enough. I've never seen anything like it.

We arrived at the hospital safely, but before we could have our "body checks" done, we had to have head shots taken, I kid you not, next to a room stocked with nothing but beer. I have no idea, even now, what the heck was going on. Pictures taken, we all proceeded to have the exact same physical examination that we were required to have in the states before we came here, only this time, I was not in a nice doctor's office. I was one of hundreds of people moving from room to room, completing steps of the body check, like height, weight, blood pressure, E.C.G., chest x-ray, and the glorious blood and urine samples. Granted, I've lived a fairly sheltered and clean existence (no guffawing, Mom and Dad), so this was bar none the most traumatic "peeing in a cup" experience of my entire life. I'm sure someone told me, but I completely forgot that Chinese bathrooms do not provide tp or even soap for that matter. Not to mention the fact that I'm standing over a ceramic hole in the ground, around which there is evidence that, even though they've been using these toilets their whole lives, women still can't aim. I think I will officially be holding it for the subsequent ten months of our stay here.

I realize that was more information that you cared to read, but quite frankly, it was more than I wanted to experience. I could not have come to a place more different from the world I've grown up in.

Anyway, we survived, and then Jackie, the International Affairs guy who has been taking care of us up to this point, took us to lunch at the place he claims to have the best noodles in Kaifeng. They were really tasty. Also, we had these veggie balls, which I swear tasted like fried okra. Or maybe I just miss home that much. All in all, though, the food here is delicious! I'll give you some more on that later, because this post is starting to run long.

Love to everyone back home, in that land where things make sense. More to follow soon, something with the less gross and more yummy. :)