Pay Day

Yes that's my shiny new Chinese debit card with my first months pay check (4000 RMB, about $590) already in the account. It's pretty nice of them to pay me considering I haven't done anything resembling work yet, and won't for more then a week. Josh told me before I came here that 4,000 RMB was more then enough money to live on considering that they provide housing and I have to say that he's entirely correct, especially when you factor in that the school pays for a round trip ticket. To put it in perspective here are the cost of some everyday things. A piece of fried chicken from a place on campus is 2-3 RMB, a chicken sandwich there is 5. A big meal, meat vegetables and a ton of rice at the Muslim noodle place we all like is 4-9 RMB depending on what you get. A bottle of soda is 2-3 RMB, it's about the same for juice or bottled water. A one way trip on the bus is 1 RMB .6 if you have the bus pass. Toilet paper is about 2-3 RMB. A lot of other stuff is pretty cheap also DVD's are just 10 and even the cereal I bought was only like 15. The original cost of the CIEE program wasn't so cheap but they're a non-profit and provided pretty good value for the money. Besides the training in teaching and in Mandarin we had, they put us up in a pretty nice hotel and showed us a lot of places around the city. They also picked us up at the airport and paid for almost every meal. All in all I don't think I spent 100 RMB while I was in Shanghai.

I went with Clark today to a used furniture place to try to find him a new side table. We took the 38 bus about 3 stops down the rickety old road which runs in front of the school. Unlike most of the roads in Changzhou which are newly paved and pretty nice this one is essentially falling apart and the bus bounced around all over the place. The store itself was a warehouse like space with tons of used furniture piled up ten feet high. There were little isles made in between the piled stuff so you could walk through. We were the only shoppers when we stopped by and they followed us around for a while but after about 10 minutes they lost interest and returned to sitting near the front. There were all kinds of things piled up, from bar stoles and dressers, to the dirtiest looking mattress I've ever seen. Eventually Clark found a table he liked but apparently whoever owned the table wasn't there at the moment so we left empty handed.

Yesterday when I went to the noodle shop I liked there were some Chinese guys sitting around who thought I was really interesting after discovering that I spoke no real Mandarin we sort of communicated about simple words, "xeixei thank you" he'd say and I'd smile and node back. After 5 or 10 minutes of this when they were about to leave I gathered from a lot of pointing and hand gestures that one of them was paying for my food. I thanked him and asked Clark later if this was something that happened. He said that yes sometimes people would buy him meals just to be nice to the foreigner. It's pretty interesting when a guy who probably makes half of what I do even in China and will probably make a hundredth or less of the money I make in a lifetime buys you dinner. The people I've meet here so far have been to a man really nice and helpful.