Sheng ri kuai le!

before i get into the nitty gritty of the birthday celebrations i forgot to mention a very important event, Susan's dance troupe performance.  For your exclusive viewing i have a video of Susan and her four friends practicing a dance that Gino helped choreograph, and that they will perform for their school this Wednesday. Tell me when to go...

enjoy!

as far as my birthday is considered, it was fantastic! i awoke early to find text messages from some Chinese friends wishing me a happy birthday, great way to start off the day.  Then throughout my classes i had multiple singings of the birthday song.  Lunch, which i have mostly come to dread these days because as a vegetarian it now always, undoubtedly includes a green mushy ball of some kind of vegetable that appears to be a cross between lettuce and bok choy, overcooked and swimming in a puddle of oil, on my birthday actually there was tofu, eggs and taro! we must celebrate small miracles...

as i mentioned previously i was treated to a birthday party with my 704 class and it was so fun! these kids are really great, very generous and kind.  they constantly ask me for my qq number which is like a messenger website like AIM that everyone here in China has... i have yet to acquire this but i will soon, i think. i was given many interesting gifts from my students, mainly, this is very exciting for me, earrings!  We had a lesson awhile ago about favorite things and collections and i shared that i like earrings a lot and showed my students a sampling of the ones i have from around the world.  They were impressed with how many places i had been and i think they wanted to make sure i had plenty of earrings from China, so i got probably 16 pairs! Other highlights include a set of traditional Chinese fans, a bracelet and hair pin from Yunnan province, a set of tea cups, five stuffed animals, a couple of music box/snow globe things and some paper weights... some are very interesting and some are very beautiful, thought that counts right?

i later went with Penny to buy a cake and go to the restaurant to get a table and choose the menu.  The restaurant is called Wan Jia Deng Huo, which i think loosley translates to One Thousand Family Homes Lighted... it is a gaudy, over decorated monstrosity decorated from floor to ceiling with plastic, gold plated pomp and circumstance.  Golden chandeliers, sconces, and frames around the italian renaissance paintings screened directly on to the walls, gave the place a yellow, hazy tint in all my pictures. In short, it was a sight to see.  It's also difficult i learned to order food for 18 people ranging in dietary restrictions and also arrival times, but i made it work, with the help of Penny, of course, translating the all Chinese menu. 

Food was pretty good and so was the cake that i bought, it had blueberry filling to my happy surprise!

*a side note, it is customary in China, and maybe other places as well, for the birthday person to pay for everything. i think the idea is that if i invite you out to a meal, i'm paying.  needless to say none of the Chinese people paid for dinner and me and five other foreigners were stuck with the bill. Luckily, despite are fake and fancy surroundings, dinner was not too expensive. However, this tradition left me with some mixed feelings. When it was Penny's birthday she wouldn't let any of us chip in for the KTV room so i guess it evens out.  But i still think i prefer the American tradition of treating the birthday person. It's the one time when they shouldn't pay for anything, this is my feeling, let me know what you think of this predicament.

A couple of us went out to have some drinks after dinner at the Forrest Blue & Jazz Bar near the river, it was raining and i had many gifts including a giant Panda bear pillow so we took taxis.  All in all a very nice evening was had. 

For the weekend Gino, Nellie and i went to Hangzhou to continue the celebrations. Unfortunately, the fall is finally coming and it rained and was surprisingly cold all weekend but we still had a pretty good time, including a little boat ride on Xihu (West Lake) in the rain. We went to an Indian buffet, Hangzhou is a much larger city and has a lot more diversity in terms of cuisine.  It was great to have something different, but it was not the best food i've ever had... nonetheless daal is always delicious, as is Coconut rice! Last and least of all we went out to a supposed "hip hop" night at Club G+, but it was a let down... they played two songs that were to be considered  "hip hop": Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls and 2 live Crew's We Want Some Pussy... i'm ashamed to admit how excited i was to hear these atrocities of songs but in comparison to the bad, really bad, techno house music they were welcome to my ears! The next day we tried to eat something resembling mexican food, but except for the existence of sour cream i could have sued them for false advertising in calling what i ordered a "burrito", no beans in the whole joint! So what i ended up eating was a tortilla full of lettuce, tomato, some cheese and sour cream! We called it a draw in the end because that's the first time i've had sour cream in two months... don't underestimate the importance of sour cream to me!

Those who can't do, teach...

this saying is bullshit! teaching is hard.  anyone who says this about teachers is a) an idiot and b) has never taught in their life.  That being said i've realized that i have mentioned very seldom the reason why i am here in the Chinas: to teach English to the children of this country.  At first, i'm not gonna lie, i was drained completely and scrambling for time and ideas.  However, as the semester has worn on i've adapted to the planning that's required.  i've even developed new techniques for discipline, including but not limited to, slamming the textbook on the front desk to command attention and throwing a note back at the person who threw it across the room, and considering my bad aim actually hitting them in the head!  Below is the motto of the Huzhou New Century Foreign Language School: 

"Read Diligently and Write Attentively, Behave Kindly and Be a Noble Man"

but i think a better translation would be "person" because that's what the last character means

...

Last week was so great it made up for all the crap i've had to put up with from the administration and uppity students 

(it was my birthday and the students went all out, more about this later). i've begun to develop more of a relationship with my students and other kids on campus; they try to teach me Chinese and are down-right shocked when i use Chinese in class, even if it's just to say the page number! During a break one day last week i attempted to show some 12-year-old boys how to correctly pass a volley ball, they started to get it and it was really fun.  Every time i walk down the hall or stairway i'm greeted with the usual hello! how are you? and sometimes surprised to hear good evening appropriately used in the right time frame.  i don't think i've said hello so many times in my life; considering the over 2 million Chinese in Huzhou and the fact that there are maybe 25 foreigners in the city and almost everyone wants to say hello when they see one, i don't think the number will be curbed anytime soon.

i wanted to share a little bit about the campus that i teach at and the schedule that these children keep.  Living on campus (not for long, maybe, we'll see) i know more intimately than i would like the habits and schedule of my students.  so it starts:

• they awake at 20 after 6 in the morning so they have time to get ready and eat breakfast. then sharply at 7:30am the loud speaker goes, playing cheesy, probably very patriotic music for the students to jazzercise to in military fashion.  Sometimes there also little pep talks in the morning with a teacher leading chants of "I'm the best!" 
  
• first period begins promptly at 8:20am and i have class at this time every day of the week with 7-year-olds, needless to say after being awake for two hours they are tired, but somehow have full bursts of energy when we play a game!
• these kids have class until 4:35pm with only 10 minute breaks in between each class and an hour and a half lunch period.  
• They get dinner time until 6pm.  This usually means that they wolf down their food and then go out to play with their friends for as long as possible.  
• This is so because at 6:20pm they begin self-study, when they go back into the classroom and silently do their homework while a teacher sits and guards them to ensure no talking, it lasts until 8pm for the younger ones and 9pm for the middle schoolers.  
• Lights out for everyone between 9:30 and 10pm! 

Can you imagine having this kind of schedule when you're a kid?  It makes me a little more sympathetic to their plight during class, but still i have my limits, you know.  + it's hard to be sympathetic when the torrent of children screaming down the stairs at the crack of dawn makes so much god-forsaken noise and then, on their way to bed they insist on banging on my door and running away into the crowd of no-pants, tighty whitey wearing, pre-pubescent boys in the hallway!

Enough about that... so actual teaching consists

of me drawing many pictures, playing musical chairs, teacher says and pictionary with the little, little ones; a lot of hangman and acting out dialogues for the Primary 5 classes; and the most fun is to be had in class 704, Junior 1.  They have the best textbook, they're the best behaved and they have the best command of English out of all the levels of my students.  Not to play favorites, but really, there are only 22 of them and i see them three times a week, so yeah, i like them best.  We do many different games like, telephone, 20 questions, and we did a scavenger hunt with Gino's class; it was a lot of fun for them i think to just get out of the classroom. 

i give them treats to celebrate their individual

birthdays and i think this might have had some influence on their decision to give me a birthday party during their homeroom period.  Over the weekend three students gave me the cake to the left.  Apparently at one of the cake shops they have art cakes, which means you get to decorate it yourself!  How cute is this winky, dribbly-faced panda bear, i ask you? The party was on my real birthday, so fun, they were really creative

 and cute! + they gave me all kinds of presents, and we all know how i like presents! 

It was a big celebration with lots of games like musical chairs, they made me act out clues and then they guessed what it was, we also drew a face on the chalkboard blindfolded and they taught me some Chinese like "ni xihuan hanbao ma?" 

meaning "do you like hamburgers?" There was more cake and one of the students played the traditional chinese violin-like instrument called the erhu, very beautiful! What a great way to remember my first birthday overseas! Then the festivities continued but that will have to wait for another post...

i heart my bike!

time is a creepin' up on me... if i put off updating the rest of the world on my many goings on in the Chinas more things happen, and then there's not enough time to fit in everything. oh what a vicious cycle! i'll try my best, regardless.

first thing's first: i bought a bicycle, finally! she's a beauty and only cost me a 100 kuai + another 35 kuai for a lock, basket and bell ting ting! (that's about $20). i'm so, so happy.  i was beginning to forget what it felt like to ride around the city, slightly fearing for my life at every turn, with the wind in my hair... i really love it, despite the traffic in China. (side note: since Nellie, Gino and i now all have bikes, when we ride around we are a gang of people, hence we have formed a bike gang. we are called Cao mei sha sho, which translates to the Strawberry Killers. We are badasses, and we will kill any strawberry, on sight.)

now, you may have heard stories, but you really don't know the horror that is Chinese traffic until you experience it.  It doesn't really matter if you're in a taxi, scooter, bus or personal car, there are no rules, no lanes and everyone refuses to stop for any reason.  At first i thought i was going to die every few minutes, then i realized that i actually would die by giving myself a heart attack from watching the road and the many, many close calls, so now i try not to pay attention when i'm a passenger... that being said, riding a bicycle is very different.  of course i pay attention to the traffic around me and i use my bell when needed.

this brings me to a topic that has been on my mind: the use of the car horn in China.  at first, again, i was extremely put off by the frequency and volume of car horns on the roads in China. Excessive, to say the least. but now, i am able to equate their honking of the horn to the ringing of a bicycle bell. They don't honk like we do in America, rarely, and only to say "hey you ass, get out of my way!" or "what the hell are you doing, MOVE!" No, the Chinese honk, as if to say, "hey, i'm here, i'm not stopping, on your left!" so though it is incessant, i think it is somehow more polite. maybe.

other things that happened this week are i got a haircut at a literal mom & pop place where Penny used to get her hair cut as a kid, for about $3! i learned the word for hair, tou fa. we were invited to do KTV with a fellow teacher whose wife is Chinese and she wanted to use us as eye candy to impress some local government people.  it was kinda fun to hang out with Paul, Annie and their daughter, Susan, but there was a down side. the government men were SO drunk a) i thought they might puke on me, b) they forced me to dance with them and c) we think they may have tried to drug me.  now don't freak out too much.  i'm fine.  but Annie, the Chinese lady who invited us, got pretty sick, like she was given something, sick.  we later put it together that she drank a drink that was poured for me but i only took a sip from and then left to select a song.  Annie is also fine, but it was a little scary.  if nothing else this has taught me that i don't want to be eye candy for Chinese rich people, even if there are lots of free peanuts!

anyway the weekend ended well because Nellie, Gino and i got foot massages at Tian tian foot massage and it was very relaxing.  They don't just soak, massage and lotion up your feet, but they also give you about a 20 minute body massage after they do your feet! so nice, we were there for over an hour, and again only 60 kuai ($9)!  and then we got some fantastic street food, bao zi, pan fried.  granted this is a breaded meat ball, and i have avowed to not eat the meat; the crunchy crispy bread dipped in hot sauce was still delicious.

despite the whole, apparently being roofied thing, the KTV night was not a total bust. Gino was able to show Susan (in my opinion one of the coolest 16-year-olds i have ever met) some serious dance moves and she therefore thought of him when she needed help to put together a performance for her school.  i truly hope to be able to witness the final dance, but if not i will at least record the practice session this saturday and share with the world four Chinese girls dancing to "Tell me when to go" by E 40, choreographed by Gino... stay tuned

Annie invited us over to dinner after Gino was practicing with Susan and i had some of the be

st food i've had in China thus far.  She kept saying that if she had known Susan was going to invite us over she would have really cooked, but it was still so good! Mushroom, tofu, and broccoli, oh my, hen hao chi! (pictured to the right are Gino, Susan, Sunny and Annie, the chef)

i have decided to become a vegetarian, in China of all places

i awoke on a Saturday morning at 6:45am so i could be at the house of the groom's grandmother by 8:30am.  just in time to see Tina, the bride, getting her hair and make-up done.  She looked like a princess, she even had a tiara. We sat around in the bedroom with the other "sisters" drinking green tea and waiting. i felt bad for Nellie because she hadn't eaten breakfast and it seemed like it would be awhile til the food, little did i know that this food experience would change me in profound ways...but i'm getting ahead of myself.

Suddenly, there was a commotion of fireworks, drums and cymbals outside we all went to the balcony to see a procession of the groom and about 15 friends and family members plus a four-person band heading towards the apartment.  i had no idea how all these people would fit in the tiny apartment; really i had no idea what was going on most of the time because, well, it was in Chinese.  They mounted the four flights of stairs to the front door and we promptly closed the door to the bedroom, placed a stool in front of the door and opened the little window above the door so Nellie could talk to Alpha, the groom.  She asked him several questions about his relationship and then asked for money, a ceremonial bribe to be let into the room to see his bride-to-be.  He offered cigarettes and all the sisters yelled "No!" then another sister got up on the stool and said if he didn't give us money he had better sing a song.  After this ritual humiliation, Alpha and the grooms party and wedding camera man were allowed in.  he gave Tina flowers and then had to hunt for her shoe and place it on her foot.  it was silly and romantic.

we headed out to the street to the sound of more fireworks and music.  i was shuffled into a car with Tina's parents and the makeup girl and we headed out to Alpha's childhood home in the countryside, about an hour outside Huzhou. i slept.  We arrived and a parade of still more fireworks and music lead us past the Nebraska of China, fields upon fields of corn, to the village.

 

Everyone came out of their houses to see the procession and once we arrived there was tons of confetti and really loud fireworks right in the middle of the crowd; there are few, if any regulations on the acquiring and/or exploding of fireworks in China... i'm very excited about this by the way.  The bride and groom made a mandatory stop at a shrine-like table with incense and candles, said a prayer, bowed a few times, everyone clapped and then it was time to eat lunch.

So lunch started out innocent enough, a bowl of candies, peanuts and sunflower seeds on every pink table-clothed table with beer and sprite for everyone. Then came a bowl of what looked like little white balls of dough. And that's what they were, in a sugary soup, very sweet and it kinda reminded me of doughy Kix. Then came trouble.  

I was feeling adventurous, no overwhelming urge to eat nothing with a face had hit me yet. they brought out steamed buns and egg role type things containing unidentifiable meats, i ate them. Then came the onslaught of whole animals: chicken with feet attached and contorted neck, it's little eyes looking at me; turtle, the shell softened into an apparently edible goo, underneath stewed bits of turtle meat, i was served a leg, it had toe nails; next came whole small crabs.  i thought i could eat that with a little instruction, i have had crab legs, after all. no, no and more no. 

One of Alpha's friends showed me how it's done.  First things first, you take the under shell off and suck the contents of the crab's ass out.  then you break off all of its legs, next you look it straight in its beady, crustacean eyes and creepy, creepy mouth and break open its top shell.  i am almost vomiting just writing this.  it was seriously like being forced to eat on of the aliens from Starship Troopers... i couldn't even open the top because i would've had to touch it's face, so Nellie did it and she is a vegetarian!  

once it was open i couldn't contain my disgust anymore, i probably embarrassed myself but i gave it to the guy who showed me how to open it and he was more than happy to receive it.  In fact, he said, "Oh, this one's pregnant! it'll be more delicious" and slurped out whatever was inside.  At that point i was eating sticky rice and edamame... finally the last straw came at dinner, same house, different types of meat, this time it was shrimp.  Because there were only three dishes of vegetables, one of them being pistachio nuts, Nellie was struggling, so she attempted to eat shrimp, but ended up just examining it and taking it apart. She officially grossed me out by tearing off the shrimp head and squeezing out its brains! i again, almost vomited.  The wedding was fun but the lasting impression the food made will outweigh everything else in my memory.

 

i wish my reasoning for attempting to stay away from all forms of meat was more noble, out of respect for all living things, but its not.  i've flirted with the idea on and off, but i always decided that i love cheeseburgers and bacon way too much.  After this experience, and the fact that all food in China is served at the very least with the maximum amount of bones in it, if not the whole animal on your plate, eyeballs, tongues, assholes, feet, everything, i can't stomach it anymore. Really seeing where the food comes from rather than prepackaged, neatly trimmed chicken breast and bacon strips, which in no way resemble the animal they come from, makes me not want to eat them; they gross me out.  + i can't get a good cheeseburger, or real bacon here anyway. 

Shanghai nights...

So Shanghai was just as i remembered it, a big metropolis, a little stinky, with millions, literally millions of people.  as you walk through the streets you can feel and see the masses walking, sitting, squatting, blocking your direct path into the metro station, they're everywhere.  Pictured below is a little fella called Hai-bo, the mascot for the 2010 Shanghai expo, already he is strewn across the city in parks and on populous street corners... i don't know what he's supposed to be but to me he looks like toothpaste with a face.

i had two goals while in Shanghai: to check out the Shanghai Book Traders Foreign Language bookstore and look at some modern Chinese art.  done and done.  At first i was disappointed by the bookstore because, though they had a surprising selection of English language novels everything from William S. Burroughs to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Michael Crighton, everything was 85 to 250 yuan! that's roughly $15-39 for a 200 page paperback? i don't think so, especially when i'm used to buying books from Twice Sold Tales for $3 (shout out).  Luckily i found a table of sale books and bought The Souls of Black Folk and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair for about $3 each! hooray for bargains.

as for the other matter, amazing.  if you're ever in Shanghai you must go to 50 Moganshan Lu and check out the galleries in this bizarre complex of art and design. we walked from our hostle near Jing'an Temple for about 45 minutes through a very strange and dirty part of Shanghai until we came across this small street with a retaining wall full, chalk full of graffiti. in Huzhou there is no graffiti whatsoever, and other than this seemingly state-sanctioned display very little in Shanghai as well.  This stuff was beautiful, futuristic with vibrant colors.  we even witnessed a dude complete with spray paint mask with a work in progress, sadly i did not take a picture of him... there were also what seemed to be several photo shoots happening on this street as witnessed below:

once we actually made it to the gallery complex down the street with a dozen or so galleries mixed in between looming, concrete apartment building and old two story wooden houses with mini-marts in the front and paper lanterns hanging off the balconies, i was so impressed. there are about 20 buildings with multiple floors of galleries ranging in styles, some clothing, some art book stores, but mainly painting and photography.  below is my favorite piece:

yes, these are real. a taxidermied tabby cat humping a dog, incredible. there was a lot of great painting and we were even able to go to the roof of one of the buildings and get a pretty good view of the city and the Suzhou creek that borders the complex.  it was a tiring adventure, as per usual, when you spend the day looking at art that baffles and bewilders you, as evidenced by Nellie's face. some other highlights i will have to give a verbal description of: a four-foot ceramic sculpture of Mao Zedong decorated completely in that blue-white traditional chinese china design, entitled the future, old mirrored dressing tables rigged so that the mirrors displayed digital, red-glowing messages about appearances, and beautiful classic black and white photos of Chinese daily life with  one or two objects like, a paper lantern or a mop expertly, brightly color-tinted.  

Our last night out in Shanghai we went to Sena and Mustafa's fantastic Shanghai apartment, it's small, modern, and has a really amazing view of Shanghai's gigantic skyscrapers.  the view was especially beautiful at night. we partied it up there with mojitos and loads of cheese and crackers for a few hours.  then, finally at 1am we went out to a club called, Zapatas!  yes, indeed the club has a giant mural of the Mexican revolutionary on the front of the building, but i was too intoxicated to take a picture of it, next time.

the last day was spent shopping in the French concession, they have H&M, Mango and Zara, oh my! plus a french bakery and a grocery store with foreign foods. including, but not limited to, pinto beans, babybel cheese and LU petit ecoliers, all of which i purchased for an insane amount: 72 yuan ($12 on three items in China is a crap-load)! back to Huzhou just in time for a country-side wedding...