Sweet Street Food

My hotel is located near a big night market that sells a lot of different interesting kinds of food. I've eaten street food in China before but it's different here. First while I usually can't tell the difference between regonal types of Chinese food I can tell that the food in Taiwan is different. It's much sweeter for one thing. I've been told before that food in Shnaghai is sweeter than food in other parts of China but I could never really taste the difference. And while the food in Guangzhou is definitely less spicy than most Chinese food it still tastes about the same to me. But when I have the sausages in Taiwan I can tell the difference. They are much sweeter and so is a lot of the other food. Some things are familiar to me, I've had stinky tofu, a favorite of mine, twice since I landed and noodles and always noodles. But the street food near where I'm staying is really good and very cheap. A lot of people eat it right there on the street at little tables but it just seems to cold to sit outside to me, even though I have only been wearing my sweatshirt. There is also quite a bit of other asian food around. I've seen a ton of Japanese and sushi places, I guess people got a taste for it during the nearly 50 years Japan rulled this island. I've also seen Korean and Thai food a couple of places. Of course there is a lot of western food as well. I've seen McDonalds and Pizza Hut as well as some local knock off chains. Well I'm going to end this here as all this talk of food has made me hungry. Bon appetit.

Live From Taiwan

Well it turns out it's getting pretty hard these days to find internet cafes. It seems with smart phones and free WiFi everywhere no one really needs a place to just use the net. Luckily my hotel has a little coffee shop with a computer in it I can use. The hotel is actually really nice. I found it on TripAdvisor, which I use a lot after Lonely Planet failed me on my last trip. Flying from Guangzhou to Taipei, the capital and largest city in Taiwan, was really easy. I always assumed that since China and Taiwan had such bad relations that it would be a lot harder to go directly from one to the other but it was a snap. It's also nice that as an American I don't need a visa or anything to go to Taiwan. I mentioned briefly before that Taiwan is a very touch issue in China, and I'll get more into that in another post, but it's even a political statement to call China, technically the Peoples Republic of China, China and Taiwan, technically the Republic of China, Taiwan, but I'm not typing out all that every time so I'm just going to refer to the two countries, another political statement, as China and Taiwan.

Today I spent a while trying to print out some of the pages from a Lonely Planet book I bought on the computer and had in PDF format. But the maps didn't print well and I ended up going to a bookstore and buying another copy of the book. The problem is that the book I bought is older than the one I have as a PDF, so much so in fact that the closest subway line isn't even shown in the older book. It's not a problem for everything though as the temples and museums don't really move to much. I saw some Taoist and Confucian temples today which were nice. I took some pictures but I can't really upload them from here so I'll do some sort of photo post when I get back. The Taoist temple had a number of people praying in it. Which basically just means lighting some incense and bowing a bunch. It's still nice to see and actual working temple since the ones I see in China people are rarely praying. The Confucian temple was much more minimalist without any of the statues of gods or big holders of incense. Instead there were a number of rooms filled with old Confucian sayings and some exhibits on the life of Confucius.

I was worried when I came here that I wouldn't be able to understand anyone. I know that more of the traditional characters are used, not such a problem since I'm not literate in Chinese anyway, and the the language was quite different. Well at least for the simple words I know I can still understand the people here. There is a good amount of English spoken as well, which isn't so shocking. I'm actually just down the block from some English teaching school which is very funny to see. I guess English is just everywhere now. Good.

North and South, My Winter Trip

Well it's that time again, the time where most people go back to work but I stop working for an extended period of time. That's right it's Chinese Spring Festival. As per usual I have almost two months off and I'm planning on doing some traveling. All the traveling I get to do during these off months is easily one of the best parts about working in China. I decided this time to go to Taiwan, which I've heard described as more China than China. Taiwan for those of you who don't know if a little island off the coast of China that China claims as its own. Before the Communists took over in China China was run by a nationalist group called the Kuomintang. They were engaged in a long civil war with the Communists before the Japanese invaded. After the Japanese left the Kuomintang were weakened enough that the Communists ended up winning. The Kuomintang fled to the island of Taiwan where the established there own separate government. The US has long protected Taiwan keeping the Communists from invading, a never ending source of tension between the US and China, China gets pissed if people even suggest Taiwan is an independent country.

Unlike in China Taiwan never had a Cultural Revolution and never took a hammer to its own history so I'm told there is still quite a bit of old buildings and temples around the island. I'm going to spend most of my time in Taipei the capitol but I'll also be going to Tainan and Kaosiung in the South of the island. After Taiwan I'm going up to Beijing to spend Chinese new year with my parents, this will be the first time I'll be in China for the holiday and I'm looking forward to seeing some intense fireworks. Then my whole family is going to Vietnam. I've been to Vietnam before but it was a really interesting place and I'm excited to go back. After that I'll be back in Beijing for a while then maybe I'll go to Hong Kong with my mother before going back to Guangzhou. I made this little map of the trip and I'll try to do a few blog posts as I travel since most of the places I'm going it shouldn't be too hard to find an internet cafe.

I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas

Not really though. It's 75 degrees here today so I hope everyone else is enjoying winter since we are apparently skipping it in Guangzhou. The Chinese people are still around in their jackets though. I used to think it was just that they always dressed to the season even if it was weather inappropriate, but after talking with some people I now believe that the incredible amount they overdress is due to the fact that most people still believe that physically being cold makes you sick. Which I why I see babies on the bus sweating like crazy when they are dressed for 10 below and it's in the 70's. But around here we are experiencing the upside of the incredibly hot summer. It's very pleasant when everyone else is freezing. I remember last year at this time in Alaer I had my space heater on at night despite the fact that it light up my room like a fireplace because even with the radiators and my big comforter I was still incredibly cold at night. I also remember going to Urumqi where it was so cold that walking outside felt like getting slapped. I don't think I have to worry about that cold in Vietnam either. I'll write up my full travel plans in a post soon. But besides some time in Beijing I'm staying mostly in the South. Snow on Christmas may be nice but 75 and sunny is better.

The Commute from Hell

After I had finally started my classes here in Guangzhou I ran into a big problem. The school here has at least three different campuses spread out around the whole city. One campus is in a fairly downtown part of the city, this was the original campus but the city kept taking more and more of the land so they got squeezed out. The next campus, where I was living, was in the North-East of the city, it would basically be considered a suburb in the US. This campus wasn't right on a subway line, though an expansion in two years will go right by there. The area was nice, it was fairly urban with a big shopping area just outside the gate but still less crowded then the main city. Right behind the building I was living in was a small green mountain and a little lake. The school also had one more campus in the South-East of the city, on an island called the Higher Education Mega Center. This whole island was basically just different universities. Guangzhou University, a higher ranked school has a huge campus there, as does Sun Yat-sen University, one of the top schools in all of China. Guangdong University of Technology, my school, had been moving more and more of its operations to this island for years, and nearly 80% of the school was now there.

The problem was almost all my classes were there as well. I had heard that there was some possibility of a commute, with only 12 hours of classes it didn't sound so bad, but for many of the other teachers who lived in the North and taught at the Higher Education Mega Center campus the school arranged a car to drive them two and from. Because my classes took so long to start, and since I was the only one teaching there in the evening, this wasn't possible for me. Instead I had to take public transportation both ways. To begin with I had to walk to the bus stop, about a 10-15 minute walk from my apartment. Then I'd get on a bus for about nine stops until I finally got to the subway. There I had to transfer twice and go about 18 stops until I finally reached the Higher Education Mega Center stop, there were actually two stops on the island. Then it was another 10 minute walk to class. The whole thing took between 90 and 100 minutes each way. So I ended up spending more than 3 hours commuting some days.

What was worse is that on Monday and Tuesday I only had one class. So I had to commute for three hours for 90 minutes of actual class time. This basically turned my light schedule into annoying slog. I was furious at the school the first time I realized exactly how far I had to go for such a little amount of teaching. It also made it really difficult to care about the classes since I was pissed at the school every time I stepped off the metro. It was just the usual Chinese way of turning what should be something really easy into something monumentally difficult. It also didn't help that riding the subway with Chinese people is infuriating. Everyone tries to get on and off the car at the same moment, though it is sometimes satisfying to knock people out of my way when I'm getting off, and no one moves away from the door making the whole thing one big clusterfuck. At least I was usually going at off-peak hours so it wasn't as crowded as it could be.

Notification

No one tells me anything. Sometimes I think I'm just being too conspiratorial when it comes to feeling like I'm left out of the loop, but I'm pretty sure that as long as I've been in China people have been not telling me vital pieces of information. For example David, the foreign affairs guy here, texted me a week ago asking if I wanted to go to a concert of Christmas Eve. I said yes, but when I asked him about it today he told me it was off since not enough teachers wanted to go. The thing is I don't think he was planning on telling me that unless I asked. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who doesn't know something as well. Trying to figure out when classes start next term is hard, unless I ask the students who all seem to know. There have been times at every school I've worked for when I come to class and no one is there. I find out later that all the students have a meeting or something, which is fine, it's just that no one bothered to tell me. I wonder if there's like a secret Chinese website where the school discusses all this stuff without me. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but in China you never know.

Making Pasta

I don't cook very much, this is true in both China and the US, but when I do the one thing I like to make is pasta. I made a big bowl of pasta with some vegetables and chopped up sausage tonight which was good, but it also reminded me why I so rarely cook. I try to keep my little kitchen really clean, there were roaches when I moved in but I think I got rid of them before I started putting any food in the kitchen, so it feels like it takes longer to clean up properly than to actually make or eat the food. Also I now have enough leftovers that I think I can eat nothing but pasta until Christmas. Finally, the cost for American food is out of hand. I traveled across the city to the only Wal-Mart around here and payed probably double what pasta and a little, and I do mean little I don't think I've ever seen a smaller jar, tomato sauce should cost. It came out pretty well even though despite using one and a half jars of sauce, plus adding a lot to it, there was still way to much pasta. Either way I probably won't be doing that again for a while, not that I need to with all my leftovers.