Five Days in China

I’ve been in China now for 5 days. So far, so good. I only start teaching next Monday, which is giving me plenty of time to settle in (and even feel kind of bored).  But, this week I will start preparing my classes and I am also currently making a list of all the places I want to visit in the city and province I am in, so that if I have some free time, I can be productive and cross things off my list!

The two other foreign teachers at this school are extremely nice and helpful. One of them is from the UK, but he has been living in China for 6 years now. The other is from South Africa and he has been here for 6 months. We have gone to see a movie together (the movies are in English with Chinese subtitles) and we’ve gone out to eat many times. Today, I went and ordered street food on my own and tried to use some of the basic Chinese I know, which failed miserably, and that’s when I realized how much I had relied on the two other foreign teachers so far!! There is so much food I don’t recognize AT ALL, but they have been able to explain it to me. What is pork, what is chicken, what is beef, but it’s not as simple as that… it can be pork intestine, beef stomach, and all kinds of other weird animal parts! I’ve already eaten some pork intestine and beef stomach, but who knows what else, since to be completely honest, I have no idea what I am eating most of the time. Chicken feet are all the rage here… thankfully those are quite easy to recognize, what with the nail still intact and all. Another popular dish is spicy rabbit head, so spicy that it is apparently supposed to make you cry. I have eaten so much spicy food already (the Sichuan province is known for its spicy food). In some cases, the food was so spicy that I was blowing my nose at least every 5-10 minutes. I can’t imagine how spicy it must be if it brings tears to my eyes. How is that enjoyable anyways?

Besides the two foreign teachers, there have been two students who work with the foreign language affairs office who have helped me. They brought me to the bank to withdraw money (Canadian currency is 5x cheaper than the Chinese currency yay!!), and they brought me to get a Chinese SIM card. That whole process took 2 hours though, since the people working at China Unicom had never seen an LG phone like mine before, and had no idea how to connect it to data, despite me changing my phone language to Chinese temporarily. I also went shopping with one of the students to the major shopping street in Chengdu: Chunxi road. We waited 1 hour in line for the fitting rooms! I am actually surprised I was willing to wait that long…I obviously really liked the clothes I was trying on 🙂 Funny thing: the biggest size available in stores here is the size I wear. Everyone is so small, I even tower over the men.

We went shopping on International Women’s Day, since there are sales in stores! International Women’s Day is quite a big deal here… female teachers had half the day off, and there were games on campus. For example, one of the games was to drop a chopstick into a water bottle (which is obviously difficult the higher up you drop the chopstick from). Anyways, each time you participated in an activity, you received a coupon and you could redeem a prize with these coupons, which was….TOILET PAPER!! All jokes aside, that is a great gift, considering the toilets at the school do not supply toilet paper. So yes, I carry around toilet paper with me wherever I go, because you never know.

Although it might sound crazy that the school does not provide toilet paper, don’t let this influence your perception of it. The school is recognized for its foreign language department. Every year, students from all over the province come to compete in an English language competition. Also, there are always activities going on: just last Friday, there was a group from Japan and Brazil performing folk music at the cafeteria. The campus is comprised of a basketball court, tennis court, soccer field, track field and ping pong tables. The basketball court is always busy with students playing pick-up games.  I have seen students on longboards and others on rollerblades. The student community is very vibrant.

One of my biggest regrets from University is not getting involved enough with the different clubs. I am hoping I can become involved with some of the sports clubs here, at this school, as a way of compensating, I guess. The other foreign teacher told me that all I really have to do is show up to one of the events and tell them I’d like to help out. His exact words were: “I don’t think you realize how much power you have here, being a foreign teacher”. I have definitely felt some of the excitement that students get from seeing a foreigner. One girl asked if she could take a picture with me, told me how beautiful I was, and kept saying how nervous she was to be meeting me… A boy in one of the classes that I was sitting in on today told me that I had beautiful eyes. Yesterday morning, I went for a run, and I stopped in the middle of campus. A student approached me and asked if I would like to become her running buddy. It’s so hard to turn down someone who is so excited about meeting a foreigner! At first, I didn’t know how I felt about having a running buddy, but now I am quite excited because I think we can motivate each other. I am meeting her for a run tonight.

I can go on for so much longer. I can talk about the crazy drivers, who make u-turns no matter where they are and love using their horns, or the moped drivers who don’t stop at red lights. While in China, you CANNOT take a green light for granted, and you must be aware of everything coming at you. I can talk about the squatting toilets, but I think you are already aware of the fact that that’s what they have in China.

So far, I am thankful with the support I’ve had since I got here. I can’t believe it’s only been five days…it feels so much longer. I’ve already learned quite a bit about the Chinese culture. I will learn so much more in the next four months though, about the Chinese culture, and about myself I am sure 🙂 I downloaded a translation app today which should help with communication and which will hopefully help me pick up Chinese quicker!