Biblical

Well I hate to brag but Yom Kippur is already over here in China and I finally had some dinner. My classes actually didn't go that badly considering that by the end of the day I was a little light headed whenever I stood up. The Chinese people I meet didn't really seem particularly interested that it was some holiday they had never heard of. I was actually pretty surprised by this given there fascination with all things western. Maybe they are just taught that it is uniportant or something or maybe unlike pretty much everything else American they just don't think its cool. I had an odd day also because in my Thursday morning class, which is probably the strongest of all my short classes, a bunch of the girls came up to me during the break asking for English names. I knew before I came here that a number of Chinese took English names when dealing with westerners, Jackie Chan is known as Chéng Lóng here, but I was never sure how I felt about the whole thing. There's just something sort of insulting about insisting that people should take on new names for your convenience. Renaming was used as a tactic of missionaries to demean the cultures of those they were preaching too including in America where Native American children were forced to go to special schools and renounce there old names. So I was always pretty touchy about what some teachers do which is essentially assign English names to the students. On the other hand quite frankly all Chinese names sort of sound alike to me. I know how that sounds but for a person like me who already has a problem with names to be bombarded by a hundred names which seem only to use slightly separate combination of like four or five sounds I become totally lost. So basically what I have done is just to call people by there English names if they give on to me and not exactly tell anyone to have one. I have something like 160 students in my classes and I see them about once a week, I wasn't going to remember their names anyways.

But today a couple of the girls just decided they wanted me to give them names. Naming I've always thought is a pretty important thing. Since it's Yom Kippur, or at least it was, I've been thinking a little about the bible. It's a pretty big deal when God gives Adam the power to name everything. For me even when I have to name a character in a video game it seems to take me 15 minutes, so trying to name the girls in about 20 seconds was a little rough. The first one who asked I named Lizzy because I have been watching the Showtime show The Tudors, about Henry VIII, and the name Elizabeth, his daughter, was on my mind. After that was Emily since I had been talking about the Brontes with someone. Then Jessica since it seems to be such a popular name now. And finally Mary another biblical name, I also seem to like -y names. It's just so odd to casually hand down something that seems as important as names or to be unable to even give a good explanation as to how I came up with it. Though next time I'm naming people after flowers.

Repeat After Me

I had three classes today and one of the hardest parts about it was to try to keep caring after repeating the same thing to each class. Every class goes about the same so when I get to the last one I just don't really care what they have to say anymore. On top of that it's still like pulling teeth to get them to say anything. I really feel like sometimes when I up there asking one of them a question it would be easier if I was trying to pull out a molar with a pair of pliers. I know sometimes maybe the activity is too hard for them but sometimes they really don't seem to be trying. One girl who insists on sitting in the back of the room talks in basically a whisper. I stopped her like five times to try to get her just to speak up. Never mind that what she's saying is only tangentially related to what I asked her, I just want her to say it in a audible voice. I just don't understand how after imploring her to speak up that many times she can't seem to raise the decibel even a little. I've seen American students asked to speak up get louder for a second then go back to normal, but she doesn't even give me that it's just a constant whisper. Sometimes I just say "fine, good" when I have no idea what they just said just to move it along to students I can hear. Also students seem completely unwilling to repeat themselves when I can't here them and will just stand there looking at the floor. I had an activity today that involved them coming up to the front of the class to talk about a celebrity who the rest of the class would try to guess. Some of them would basically run up mumble something to the floor then try to run back before anyone could take a guess. The effect of doing this three times in one day gives me feeling of being Sisyphus endlessly rolling the bolder up the hill.

Chinese Democracy

Chinese Democracy is the name of a long awaited never released album by the 80's rock band Guns N' Roses, the theoretical album cover is pictured to the left. But I also thought it was a good title today for the things I wanted to talk about. I sent my request in yesterday for an absentee ballot for the Presidential Election. I have no idea if they'll actually be able to send it to me here but what the hell it didn't' take long. There's actually something sort of inspiring about voting in a country where the people can't and if they actually send me a ballot I'm going to show it to my classes. On the other hand there is the usual lack of inspiring that comes from voting in a state who's electoral votes are already decided. I received my first piece of mail today which was partially a test if an address written in English characters would get far in China. I put the address in an earlier post I think but here it is again:

Jiangsu Teachers University of Technology
International Office
1801 Zhongwu RD, Changzhou 213001
Jiangsu, China

江苏技术师范学院
国际合作与交流处
中国江苏省常州市中吴大道1801号
邮编：213001

You don't have to have the Chinese characters but I think if you wanted to print them out and use them also it wouldn't hurt. Note that if you can't see the characters you probably need to update the browser you are using to see the internet.

The other interesting experience I had was in mistakenly mentioning Taiwan. I had my students tell me something about people in Chinese history and one wanted to tell me about Chiang Kai-shek, he is called by a different name in Chinese, who was general who opposed Mao and lead Taiwan until his death. My students have a tendency to mumble made all the worse by the fact that they like to look at the floor when they talk and that they hate to repeat themselves for some reason. The student, who is probably the best in her class started by asking me if I knew what Taiwan was, only she mumbled Taiwan so I had to keep asking her what she was saying. Finally I figured it out blurting out, "you mean Taiwan, like the country?" Which immediately got a small gasp the student shooting back "the country?!" and a couple of laughs at my embarrassment. I waved it off saying "whatever you call it just go on," but it's an odd feeling to wonder if you'll get in trouble with the government over what you say. It won't actually be any problem unless you go around looking for trouble there pretty laid back here. You would think it would be really noticeable to live in a country with such limited freedoms, but really there little noticeable difference. Even if you won't get in trouble with the government there are plenty of things people don't talk about in America and it's really no different here. Maybe the thing I notice most is how it's not really possible to follow Chinese politics since you can't trust a word written about it in the papers. People rise and fall in the party but there's no really good source of information on it. The sort of political restriction they have here just seem to more or less stay out of everyday life.

Some Video Blogging

Well it may be a day late and a dollar short, but here is the video I took of one of the street vendors making me some dinner. I've gone to this vendor a lot since he make more dinner sort of food instead of snacks and now I get a big "Hello!" every time I walk over to him which is pretty much the only word of English he knows.

Street Food

I'd thought I'd tell you a little today about some of the more interesting food that they have for sale out in front of the school at night. It changes pretty regularly actually, I wonder if some of the people think that maybe certain times of the year are better for their foods or if they are just looking for some area with higher foot traffic. Maybe the oddest thing you see at night are actually the same stands you see during the day, which are fruit stands. They don't have a huge selection of different fruits but it's just not the thing you think that people are likely to buy at 10 o'clock at night, a couple bananas or some watermelon. You also see quite a few stands selling various meats on sticks. It's pretty much anything you can think of put on a stick. To keep it from being cold, people in China hate nothing more then any sort of cold food, McDonalds here seems to be most known for ice cream simply because cold food seems to western, the vendors have their food uncooked and they have little grills going behind them where they cook the food once you order it. This isn't necessarily the most sanitary situation since they pretty much put everything together so that there is definitly some mix between cooked and uncooked meat. There is also this interesting place where they sell various sort of flat breads. These breads are amde right there on a flat round hot stove from batter and have various little coatings put on them. Again this is all pretty much done by hand, literally, so again sterility is not exactly the priority. Some places have other things besides meat on a stick. One place I like has fired chicken something, I say something because I can't really say what part of the chicken it is but it's put into strips battered and deep fired to order. Finally a place I just discovered does a sort of dumping soup. The dumplings are just raw meat put into a little pocket of dough, by hand again. When you go to order it they take six or seven dumpling and boil them for a few minutes. While they're boiling the guy takes a bowl and puts a little plastic bag into it. Into the bag he puts various spices, again with his hand, and then pours some hot water. The dumplings come out and go into this. The bag is tied up in the bowl and then the bag and bowl are put into another bag so I can carry them home without it spilling. It's sort of an ingenious system, I just hope he occasionally washes his hands.

This is not Gumby

The more jaded of you might say hey, wait a minute, that looks an awful lot like Gumby. But no that blue figure waving so happily is not Gumby and I'll have you know there are in fact several key differences. For one thing Gumby is a copyrighted cartoon character and our blue friend is the symbol the Shanghai expo. A big event, apparently, that is scheduled to take place in like two years. For another thing he's blue. Another difference is, well actually that's pretty much all the differences. Not that I would be so crass as to accuse the good people of the Shanghai expo of stealing Gumby entirely and trying to hide this by slapping a blue coat of paint on him, but if he has a talking horse as a friend I'm going to alert the authorities. I saw our good friend Cumby (Chinese Gumby) down near Wal-Mart. When I was in Wal-Mart today I started to notice some interesting differences between our America Wal-Mart and this one. Now a lot of these had not really occurred to me before for two reasons. One, I don't think I've ever been to a Wal-Mart in America. It's not that I look down on Wal-Mart thinking for example that it's for hicks or that any place that has its own brand of wine and shotguns shouldn't be allowed anywhere near me, it's mainly that I'm a Target person. Two, I go to Wal-Mart here mostly looking for American things so I don't notice the Chinese things as much.

The first thing that caught my attention was this alrge stack of powdered milk that for some reason was on steep discount. Interestingly despite the Chinese predilection for saving money I don't think I even saw a Chinese person look directly at it. The next odd thing I noticed was the behind the food counters where in America you might see cold cuts of vegetables, or since we are talking about Wal-Mart chicken fried stake, I instead saw pot after pot of I don't know what. I don't mean to say that I wasn't quite sure what was in them, I mean that if someone came up to me with a gun and told me he'd shoot me if I couldn't correctly identify even one of the food items, I would go ahead and tell him to shoot. Going farther into the Wal-Mart I saw a fruit that sort of looked like what I imagine a porcupine would look like if it were a fruit. It was greenish brown and seemed to be entirely made up of sharp corners. Finally, I think my favorite thing was the raw fish and squid that was just sitting in the middle of the isle on a display table with no bags or anything near it. I'm sure you're supposed to ask someone for help but I'm also pretty sure I could have gotten away with just shoving a fish in my little blue basket and flopping it down on the check out counter. Honestly I'm sort of curious what they would have done.

No 4th of July

Well National Day in China is certainly no 4th of July. If it wasn't for the fact that there was no school it would feel exactly like any other day, and given how little school I've taught it sort of does. There were at least some fireworks tonight, though to be fair they have fireworks if they open a 7-11 so I can't be sure those had anything to do with the holiday. The biggest display of fireworks I saw was right in the frost of the hotel, but those were for a wedding. There must have been a wedding reception in the hotel because at about 3 pm there was a limo and two big buses pulling up and they started setting of a ton of little fireworks outside the hotel. They may have been more impressive if it wasn't the middle of the day since you could barely see them. They didn't get all that high either since I was about on eye level with them on the 14th floor. What they did do was create a ton of noise. It sounded sort of like some one had built a shooting range right in front of the hotel. I looked out my window, which faces the back to see what all the fuss was about. Despite the loud noises not one of the students I saw walking around even looked in the general direction of the noise. I guess that fireworks are so common in China that it's not even really worth looking at when it happens right in front of you. National Day seems to be basically a nothing holiday that's only notable for getting time off. The amount of extra celebration for the lunar festival, which only gave one day off, was ten times greater. I know form reading about it that there is at least some celebration of National Day in Beijing, but for a country that is in many ways as fiercely patriotic and proud of itself as China it just strikes me as strange that this holiday isn't a lot bigger.