This wordpress access in China is terrible!

I’ve opened a Blogspot blog to replace this blog. Either wordpress can’t keep their status up or the firewall here – the new great wall – is too strict. Either way I have not been able to access the wordpress dashboard in weeks! So please go to csowsley.blogspot.com to pick up where this blog left off. Thanks and enjoy!

 

Mid-Autumn Day, I’m not sick, and day one of classes…

Chinese people celebrated the Mid-Autumn Day festival Tuesday, September 25th by enjoying moon cake and time with family. I spent the day preparing for my first day of class and walking around Jiujiang city center.

The Chinese follow two calendars – the twelve month Julian calendar and the lunar calendar. According to the lunar calendar yesterday marked mid-autumn – the crop harvest. To celebrate, the Chinese bake moon cakes to share with family and friends. The moon cake is a round, sweet pastry with a variety of centers ranging from fruit jellies to fibers and grains with a pattern stamped in the top. I have read three versions of the history of the moon cake and mid-autumn festival. One version, succinctly put, references an earlier Chinese ruler and the peasants’ revolt. The revolt was orchestrated by embedding plans in the pattern stamped on the surface of the cake. Others stories involve mythological characters as an explanation for the patterns seen on the surface of the full moon. The Foreign Affairs Office gave each of the foreign teachers a gift of four cakes in a beautifully designed box package.  My co-teacher, John, also gave me two as a gift. I shared three with friends I have made since arriving here and enjoyed one to myself early Tuesday.

I’ve fully kicked the cold that put me down for almost a full week. After the two days of IV’s I began a regiment of running and cough syrup. By Wednesday, the 19th, I was confident the cold was over save for the productive cough and an occasional sounding of the nose-kerchief horn. I stopped the cough syrup and kept with the running each night. Air here is so heavily polluted that even now, a full week since my return to full spirits, I have something akin to smokers cough giving me the occasional burst into convulsive cough but even that is beginning to subside.

Today, Wednesday, was the first day of teaching for me. Freshmen completed their military training last Friday by conducting a magnificent parade and display on the south track and field arena in front of the university president, chairman, and other distinguished guests. Friends and family watched from the stands.

My students are IT majors that plan to study abroad their 4th year of college. Their studies here for the next three years will be an aggressive English training course to prepare them for life in a western English speaking culture. There are some stark differences between Chinese and Western academia. One example – all students, upon entering college or university practice military training for 15 days before beginning classes. This means that while sophomores thru seniors began classes September 3rd, the freshmen began classes only today, the 26th.  Some other smaller differences – each class designates a class monitor before I even meet them. I do not know the details of this role yet, and I am trying to figure it out, but as near as I can tell the monitor is a student that will serve as liaison between the students and me. This student also works to maintain discipline in the classroom among the students, handles paperwork, and appears to delegate some authority over the them [the students]. A third difference I was surprised to see happen today – as the end of class approached, no one collected themselves preparing to leave five minutes before class was over. More surprising – the class bell sounded and I had to tell the students “Please leave. Class is over now. Go enjoy your afternoon.” 

Aside from preparing for class since late last week, I have ventured out into the city a few times taking more photographs of everyday life in Chinese culture. Week 3 specials will be posted very soon on the Picasa site. You may notice another new link to Lightstalkers in the right column also. Lightstalkers is an online photographer member-site that offers portfolio support and a forum for photographers to share ideas, news, and photo related material. I am putting my professional work there until I can sort out the issues with accessing my personal site with my host provider. Since they are in the US they keep saying they cannot recreate the problem I am having. No kidding! You have to be BEHIND the new great wall before it blocks you.

This weekend China will celebrate National Day, a week-long celebration. Many people will travel and I plan to be one of those people. Monday night, October 1st, I will board a train to Shanghai. The train is possibly the slowest train available – I am scheduled to arrive in Shanghai 15 hours after I leave. A bus from here to Shanghai can make it in 8 hours according to Huang Xiao Kui. The price for a bus ticket is nearly double to cost of the train ticket. Much of the trip will be through the night so I will miss much of the countryside but hopefully be well rested once I arrive in Shanghai to enjoy all it has to offer [in two days]. It is extremely likely that the next post will be after I return from Shanghai.

Thanks for reading.

 

the long dark cold

Day four of an annoying cold is coming to a close. Yesterday I gave in and went to the university clinic just to make sure it was a cold and nothing more serious. While the experience was interesting, I don’t know that it yielded an accurate diagnosis. A student volunteer went with to translate but the difficulty of medical vocabulary was a bit over her head I think. It’s one thing to learn “Hello. Nice to meet you. What is your name? What do you do for a living?” and quite another to say “I have Ibuprofen but no aspirin. Also, tell the doctor if it helps, I brought Tylenol Cold and Sinus.” I couldn’t even show the doctor the box because the medicinal terms were in English, not Chinese. After a very brief visit with the doctor I left with a prescription in hand and a feeling of unsuccessfulness. Ah! But then it got interesting again. When I took the prescription to the window I received six bottles – two large bottles of cough syrup and four smaller bottles. I asked my helper what the smaller bottles were for and she explained that they were for the needle. Needle!? Four?! We walked up to the third floor and handed the bottles over to the nurse at the window. I was escorted into a room lined with metal chairs and poles for IV bottles. There were already about 5 students there all with IV’s. When the nurse came in 10 minutes later with a large glass bottle of something and began to tie off my wrist with the rubber tourniquet for starting an IV I started asking my helper what happened to the four small bottles and put the international symbol for time-out up. No, I didn’t make a T with my hands; I pulled my hand away from the needle while I asked my helper what was in the bottle. The nurse pulled my arm back onto the armrest – I pulled it back away. It was like a small Benny Hill skit. When I stood up to read the only English on the bottle – Glucose and Sodium C___ (can’t remember the last word anymore) I realized it [more than likely] was a harmless bottle of glucose – what I have always known to be sugar water. Maybe I was wrong, but after an hour the bottle was empty of whatever was inside and it was then pumping through my veins. I had to go back this morning for a second bottle. Apparently, the four bottles were given in two doses mixed into the water or liquid in the bottle that was injected into me intravenously. Well, I feel a bit better, thought the cough has not subsided, only been subdued. The runny nose has run a long enough course and I’m glad of it finally drying up for now. Over all I am optimistic that with a couple of days resting and going stir crazy in my apartment I will be back to 100%.

Until next time, I hope your health is better than mine. If it isn’t – I hope you have a doctor that speaks your language.

 

What a bummer…I got sick.

The weather turns nice, the skies are blue, and so is my mood. Tuesday I began feeling a slight tickle at the back of my throat. It was just enough to worry me and today the soreness in the throat is gone and replaced with a subtle chest cold or bad allergy. I’m not sure which and there are symptoms I am familiar with in my personal health history from each. So again, I am going to be brief. But good news! My brief posting will have a new link for you to go to and look at more photos!

Yes, that’s right, I finally uploaded a new folder to the photo album called Week 1 Picks. The title is absolutely NOT vague, leaving me with nothing else to write about it. Maybe I could write – click the link and have a look.

This morning the foreign teachers, myself included, attended the opening ceremony of a local English language high school. I will go into the details of the ceremony at a later time. In the evening I joined with the student organized photo association. They appear very enthusiastic about the group and received me with warm applause. Informal sources commented earlier that foreign teachers are not typically invited into the student organizations because of the language barrier. On the contrary, I found this group to be very excited to have me in their association. I look forward to many chances to go with these students out into the city and county on photography outings.

That’s it for today. Take a look at the photographs. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I did taking them. I’m off to find rest and better health.

 

 

Today we had a meeting…

Yesterday we had a meeting also. The day before that it rained. When you scale down the material to one sentence you really must pay attention to which sentence you write. The title and first two sentences are great examples of what NOT to write when you are trying to draw in readers with a strong lede.

I’m out of time to detail the events of today and yesterday so I will briefly summarize the two days by saying that we held meetings between the foreign teaching staff and the NCCedu accrediting staff to introduce the course material we will be teaching students beginning the 26th of this month. The weather today was so incredibly beautiful it would only be fitting that today we spent the majority of our time in a meeting room.  After the meetings I headed into city center to photograph street scenes and culture. As I write this the images are downloading to my computer.

Very soon I will have all of Week 1 favorites captioned, keyworded, and uploaded to a Picasa album. After that batch is complete I would like to come closer to daily posts and uploads. I have also been taking short streaming clips to assemble into a multimedia piece about Jiujiang. That is going to take a little while longer to upload. Please be patient looking for that.

Tomorrow I plan to set aside time to talk more about the material I will be teaching and more backtracking to fill in other things I have been up to for the past couple of days.

Today’s new words:
Friends = peng you [puong yo]
Jiujiang city central = da zhong da [dah jong dah]
I don’t understand = Wo bu dong [Woh boo dohng]

 

Dinning in China…it’s a bit different.

On September 10^th, Jiujiang University [JJU] celebrated Chinese Teachers Day by recognizing outstanding teachers for their hard work and dedication to a year of their profession. Sunday night, September 9^th, the president and chairman of the university invited all JJU foreign teachers to join them for dinner at the LianXi hotel on campus. JJU has brought together a diverse group of people to form their foreign teaching staff – doctors from Bangladesh and India, along with educators from Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Japan and the U.S. I thought it would be nice to share with you what dinning in China is like as a general rule.

Meals in China are conducted in a much more intimate manner than most westerners have experienced. Each place setting has one main plate about 5 inches in diameter, a soup bowl of proportional size, a soup spoon, one tea cup, a 3 ounce glass for beer [or in Sundays instance – a port glass for wine], and chopsticks. The plateware is porcelain, including the soup spoon and at the hotel dinner a third plate with a folded moist towel was included.

The course dishes are brought to the table and placed on a large center piece that rotates. In the U.S. this table is called a Lazy Susan but there is no need to memorize this trivia – the Chinese I’ve spoken with have never heard the term. It is common to see a large variety of food brought to the table. Guests will rotate the centerpiece and sample small portions of each plate as a dish comes in front of them. Being able to work chopsticks is crucial as there are no other utensils at the table. In some instances a serving pair of chopsticks will compliment a dish but many of the guests will use their own chopsticks to grab pieces of food from the plates. You can judge by the others at the table which is preferred and follow suit.

 If you are new to the country your fellow guests at the table will watch your chopstick skills and comment or compliment [whichever is appropriate] your ability to use them. If you are unable or barely able to work the utensils they will ask the staff for a fork for you or ask you if you would like a fork. Be mindful, in Chinese culture saving face is very important, especially for the men. Try everything to make the chopsticks work – being given a fork is an embarrassment to you. The Chinese hold westerners that can adapt to the culture in high regard.

If your meal plate begins to fill with shells or bones a waitress will replace your plate with a new one. Watch for fish bones in every seafood dish – seafood is served whole, including the head! Also, napkins are not laptowels. In many restaurants, a small packet of hand tissue is placed between two seats and guests will pull one to use sparingly for their fingers or lips. The manner of dinning limits the need of a napkin.

Meals are very inexpensive by comparison to meals in the U.S. For example, at a seafood restaurant in downtown Jiujiang that plays live piano, has three floors with an elevator inside, beautifully decorated motif, which would easily earn a 5 star rating just by appearance and ambiance alone, a group of ten can order a full course dinner for 300 Yuan [roughly $39 USD]. That is fine dinning in Jiujiang.

 

Today is Chinese National Teachers Day

OK OK, I missed making a post yesterday. There’s a good reason for it. Unfortunately I do not own the rights to any of the good reasons so I will have to settle on a not-so-good reason. Tonight isn’t much better so I must be brief.

Last night I attended a dinner for the foreign teachers hosted by the university. We met and had dinner with the president, assistant president and chairman of the school along with other distinguished guests at the LianXi hotel. It was a fantastic dinner and every dish was delicious! After the dinner a few of the foreign teachers felt it would be a good idea to finish the night at a local bar – Ali Ba Bar. There are a couple of things that westerners might find interesting about going to a bar here. Jiujiang does not have club soda. I found this out as I was ordering a Stoli and soda. I noticed four bottles of red wine each partially empty so I ordered a red wine. They do not serve red wine by the glass so we bought a bottle. I think I made a new speed record for blocking when I halted their attempt to pour the red wine over ice for me. In comparison, everything else that took place last night just made sense. 

Today is the Chinese festival celebrating teachers. In the morning the president, chairman and many high ranking officials of the university held a ceremony in a university hall honoring teachers with awards in excellence. In the afternoon I met with another foreign teacher to go to city central for no particular reason.

The weather here has turned to rain and today was marked by heavy rains most of the day. I was told that this area has moved into the rainy season and more often than not it will rain from now until March of next year with snow in the winter. 

Tomorrow I hope to be back into a better pattern and able to devote more time to the blog and its content. Also, I am working on captions for the images I have been taking and will post a new section of material very soon on the Picasa site.

Todays new words:
Please sit down = Qian zuo xia [cheeng zoi zja]
Eggplant = Qie zi [ che e zuh]
Rice = Mifan [me fan]
I am an American = Wo shi mei guo rem [Woah shi may guoa yen]

 

2nd Saturday of the week…

I met my co-worker today. In a great stroke of luck four co-workers were brought in for four foreign teachers. This isn’t a TA position held by a student. Rather, the school has brought in English education professionals to assist us with translating and arranging the class. So, get used to seeing the name John mentioned a lot as I believe he will be saving me from many pitfalls in the translation process. John is my co-workers name…that might have been apparent but…oh you get the idea.

Here’s a fun situation I found myself in today. This afternoon I taught an open class for potential students at an English Language Center in downtown Jiujiang. The children ranged from 7 – 11 years old. There were no guides, no material, no outline of what they wanted me to teach – and it was all a bit of a surprise since I was under the impression that I would be there as a foreign “delegate” not today’s teacher. There were two teachers from the school there to assist with translation and five minutes into the class I was grateful they were there. 

The basic words I wish I knew when I arrived failed me the moment I stepped into the classroom. I was a deer in headlights trying to explain the meaning of the word too to elementary school children. By the time I tried to explain AM and PM I wanted to “accidentally” fall ill with some horrible virus that would render me handicapped, unable to speak and need immediate evacuation. You cannot imagine the clarity of vision that can play out inside your head about ways to escape as you hopelessly try to teach children of a foreign language that “you” is … you as you point like a doo-doo at one of the students. I will not go into them all but I’ll tell you that one involved a fantastic maneuver of flexibility as I careened out a 4th floor window like I was Jason Bourne. After today some poor girl in the first row will forever be nicknamed “you” because of me.  

Nick, a fellow foreign teacher at the University recently back from India and the Philippines, asked if I could also go to a village an hour and a half away tomorrow to do it again for two classes. Only this time because the village is fairly remote there is a good chance many of the people have never seen a foreigner before so the children may not be as advanced as the ones today in their English. My head was a bit in the clouds after only twenty minutes of teaching the class today but I believe I excused myself from tomorrows classes by describing the overwhelming pile of socks I have to sew…or something about as ridiculous as that. [For what I think will be a very small group of readers not familiar with my random…we’ll call it humor…I’ll admit this time that I was much more cordial about my explaining that I was not the instructor Nick was looking for to teach little children on Sunday and politely declined the offer.] It was an offer too; teaching at Language Centers on the weekend is something foreign teachers do to supplement their income. I think I will keep with the college level teaching. I liked the experience but not enough to switch to K-12 education.   

That was my day briefly. The Picasa gallery is up. There is a link in the side bar now. I’m working through the first week of images trying to caption and edit down to a nice 1^st week album. But some photo’s from walking around campus Friday are online.

Words I should know by now but don’t:
Excuse me …
Pardon me …
Please.

 

 

Friday!

Friday! Today when I woke up it was the second Friday I’ve been here in China. I still think of time in relation to the U.S. When I wake up I think of my friends and family just going to sleep [last night] and as I write this I imagine they are just arriving at their jobs to enjoy their Friday.

During the lunch hour I met with my volunteer helper to buy my mobile SIM cards. First we went to China Unicom [Yesterday I referred to as telecom referencing the name on my cell phone screen. They are one in the same] and paid 20Y to receive 380Y on the phone. [I am still trying to comprehend how their phone service fees are assessed.] Immediately following that purchase we walked over to the China Mobile tent to pick up a China Mobile SIM. [see yesterday’s post about Chinese cell phones and SIM cards for an explanation] where I gave the clerk 50Y for 300Y China Mobile SIM. The 50Y I gave them was from the change I received at China Unicom. [That is important background for what happened next.] When the girl put the 50Y through the money reader it rejected it. Counterfeit money is a big problem in China and you always have to be careful about who you get money from. Apparently that even applies to vendors on a school campus because today I got to feel what it was like to have fake money. If I could understand the language I imagine I’d have heard them swearing my name for trying to pass a fake bill. Luckily for me, I just got the 50Y a few minutes earlier and my helper went back with me to the other tent to explain the problem. We all politely agreed that the China Mobile money machine was broken and there was nothing wrong with the money then they changed the one 50Y for five 10Y. I was lucky. They could have easily said that I switched the money and that the bad 50Y was not theirs. In the end everything we set out to accomplish was accomplished. By 12:15PM I was the proud new owner of two phone numbers.

That was the only excitement of the day. Later I took a sunset stroll through the campus taking more photos. Afterward I went shopping for a few necessities. Here’s something of interest to know. Campus wide, the canteens do not provide napkins. Students carry small disposable packets of tissue instead. In general, restaurants will not provide napkins until you ask for them. When they arrive they are packed in a small packet and their texture is similar to face tissue.

Words I wish I knew today:
Excuse me …
Pardon me.
I don’t understand.
How much is this?

Today’s new word:
Envelope = xin feng [shing fong]

 

Happy 1st week to me!

Today…at this hour to be too exact…marks my first week in Jiujiang. This has been a remarkable week! There are so many things I was not prepared for and so many other things I was over prepared for. Before I get too far into today I’ll let you know now that the days leading to today will be added as I find time to flesh out the details of those first days exposure. At first, these posts will be filled with prep work about what I am doing to make sure you can enjoy the blog and maybe even be able to take something away from reading my notes.

If you are planning to travel here, work here, live here…any of these reasons are good enough for me to try very hard to write explicit accounts of my life and what I have come across since my arrival. 

Today I spent much of the day reading news from the states, editing photographs, and developing the first newsletter to friends and family. In the afternoon I traveled into the city with my student tour guide – Huang Xiao Kui. She is a volunteer assistant in the international department at the university that helps foreign teachers and students negotiate daily living needs such as banking, shopping, and learning more about the city. OK, the last isn’t a need so much as an interest but are we going to split hairs on this one? We went into the city to get a SIM card for my new mobile [cell phone] which, after arriving at the China Mobile store, we realized could have been purchased on campus. Oops! Well, it was a simple mistake and one that I didn’t mind having happen because I got a great new feature photograph and another trip to city central [shi zhong xin].

A good thing to know…
The Chinese have a unique cell phone system that relies heavily on the SIM card. Unlike the US, where mobile services sell you rate plans attached to a phone they provide either free or for a fee, in China the phone you purchase is not locked and therefore can be used by any of the service providers you choose. That sounds great right? If it were the US this phone could be used with a SIM card from T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon…you get the idea. Here there are TWO service providers – China Mobile [which is a GSM service that covers anywhere in China with a signal] and China telecom [which only provides service in Jiujiang]. Even with the limitation of only two providers, the chance to own ANY phone you like and use it with either SIM card is a great deal, but it gets better! A small number of phones here are designed to house TWO SIM cards! With this type of phone you can have the lesser expensive but range limited China telecom and when you travel out of the area with the push of a button you switch to the China Mobile GSM SIM card.  Buy either service or both minute by minute.  The SIM cards here do not work on a monthly plan like in the US. Here you add money [time] to the card when the card is empty [or out of minutes].  For most people the card costs about  10Y [yuan] and you put additional money on the card to use the service.  China telecom is mobile-to-mobile free . If you are a student [or a university teacher] check out deals the first week of classes where both providers will feature very good deals on rates – new SIM card  and 300-500Y in minutes costs 20-50Y.

More to come…
I’m still working on the Picasa albums and some background information to fill in since last Thursday. It will be up soon. A new flyer will be ready for next time.

Thank you for visiting…

CS