Your tea ma'am.....in a Thimble

It is Sunday and my my my, the weekend has been rather full already. I have once again transformed into I Love China Kristen, though there are some qualifications for such a statement. I do Love China, however the babies with the buttless pants, hmm, they just need to stop that. I was in Walmart in Nanshan last Wednesday visiting friends for dinner and all of a sudden a mother and her son are in an aisle and the mother holds the child out in front of her and the kid just poops on the floor of the candy section! Are you kidding me? Can they not at least take the kid to some bushes or something? That led to a conversation with my friend Eddie about the same phemonenon on Friday and he said he was in Jussco (Japanese grocery/dept. store) last year and a little kid with the same 'special kind' of missing fabric in the butt pants was sitting on one of those black leather massage chairs that was a floor display and the mom just let him pee in the chair. The store attendants just smiled! This is a NICE store....that is gross! Basically it's a safe assumption that every thing, I mean every thing you touch has already been peed on. Take the hand wipes with you my friend.

Nanshan is an interesting area of town, think Orlando meets Las Vegas in China. It's very lush and tropical...full of flowers and palm trees and a monorail, yes a monorail! It runs around the whole area and past my friend's apartment. There is an amusement park called Windows of the World right off of the last subway stop as well. It reminds me a lot of Epcot Center in Orlando because it is a theme park centered around miniature versions of places such as the Louvre, the David, sculptures by Rodin, The Eiffel Tower, etc. It's cheap at night...only 30 kuai, but its 150 during the day. There's also an indoor ski slope too. For 85 kuai/hr one may partake in skiing and that includes pants, shoes, poles and skiis. Nice! Though, I am guessing if I pulled on a pair of Chinese ski pants, I would find them to be ski capris on me. For the truly avid skiier in South China, a yearly pass can be purchased for a discounted price, haha.

I took the 311 bus home that night from Nanshan all the way across town to where I live in Liantang - I had originally taken the subway out there, but had to change to a bus, so I was going to compare the two amounts of time. Well the 311 bus is much faster, but dude, the people who ride buses at 9pm at night are so very strange! I get on the bus, talk to the ticket lady about how much it costs to ride the bus to my area, sit down, turn my music on and start to read my book. Well ten minutes later I look up and the whole, I mean the entire bus is staring at me. Two guys next to me are even making a whole conversation out of my feet; they're pointing at my feet and laughing hysterically. So, curiousity gets the better of me and I pull out one earphone and start listening to what they are saying. The gist of it was that they had never seen a woman with feet as big as mine or toes as long as mine for that matter. They called them "monster feet" and "finger toes" and then commented that I was wearing "poor man's flip flops" - they are the $2.50/pr ones from Old Navy. Sometimes I almost wish I didn't understand Chinese - then I wouldn't know for sure that people were talking about me. I made it home in 50 minutes though....much faster than the Subway/Bus combo.

Teaching this week was for the most part pretty great. I've decided that 12 year olds are totally my favorite. They respond to the bribing via the use of stickers. We play games at the end of each class where it's either right side versus left side or boys versus girls and the winners get stickers. Huge motivator! Also, I tried an activity where the students toss a wadded up piece of paper from one person the another to answer questions......well the little bums don't really want to answer questions, so they dodge the paper ball and instead of people catching it, it falls on the floor. Hmm, or maybe it's that their eye-hand coordination is terrible. The guys started to use each other for target practice, but.....they were using English and not being too obnoxious, so I declared it to be a winner. With my junior 3s this week we were practicing using lots of adjectives to make a sentence more interesting. For example I wrote the sentence "The cat likes milk" on the board and then expanded it to the following "The large, gray, clever cat, who lives with my 98-year old grandmother in her 3rd floor apt. on 54th street in NYC, really and truly on likes to drink slightly heated chocolate milk on every third Sunday of the month." So then I made them make the 5 word sentence, "the boy loves the girl" into a 25 word sentence. I really got some good ones out of the students, though 'blue-haired' and 'looks like Michael Jackson' seemed to be the favorite comments for the boys oh and the smartasses in the back found it monumentally amusing to use the word 'sexy.' Mature fellows they are, ha.

When I went out to Nanshan, I met up with 7 other teachers and we spent the whole evening talking about teaching and we all came to the realization that our diction has changed since coming to China. We all have elimintated contractions from our spoken English and we speak very very slowly and repeat people's comments quite a bit (a clarification technique we use while teaching so that all students understand what their classmates are saying). Additionally, we all use the word "must" a lot b/c Chinese people who speak English use it instead of saying 'should.' Hopefully none of these changes will be too permanent.

Anyhoo...Thursday night Jesse (teacher here for a second year who lived in my apt. last year and taugt at my school) and I had an authentic Chinese evening. We went to his friend's teahouse (it's actually a large polished teak log about two feet high with 4 stools made out of stumps that sits in the back of a grocery store near my apt). Zhang Tianfu (name means "Zhang who adds fortune") and Jesse became good friends last year while Jesse was teaching at the school I am at now. So we sit down and start drinking our thimble-sized cups of tea and talking with Mr. Zhang and the two other folks there. We spoke Chinese for about an hour while becoming 'wired' off of heavily caffinated tea, and the old man wearing his undershirt and slippers sitting next to Jesse kept complimenting me on my Chinese skills and how easy I am to understand. Ha! I love being patronized by old people. The lady sitting with us spent 13 years in Bangkok, and she was telling us how much cheaper it is to vacation there....good to know. I'll have to go back and visit. So, from the teahouse, I bid my new friends goodbye and headed back to the factory district in my neighborhood. Oh by the way, Jesse's little escapade to the teahouse foiled my former status quo with the people in the grocery store. Everyone in there before Thursday night was convinced that I didn't speak a word of Chinese, now everyone knows I speak and understand it. While we drank tea, all of the workers surrounded the teahouse and listened to our conversation. So I will be speaking Chinese with them for the rest of the year. Before, they would just point at the numbers on a cash register like I was an idiot or something in order to tell me how much my groceries cost.

We walked down little alleys lined with gray, crumbling cement buildings that were 'decorated' by the colorful laundry hung out on hangers to dry on each balcony. As the sun set, it looked truly beautiful. Jesse took me to his favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant where for 3 kuai (35 cents) we had an amazing bowl of 'ba mian' or noodles with a peanutty sauce. I will definetely be a regular at that woman's restaurant from now on, the noodles were out of this world. The evening finally ended at a restaurant off of the main road where we got vegetable curry and tea. Yum yum....gotta love the progressive dinner that only costs a dollar and we even picked up a dinner companion at the final restaurant. A man from Hong Kong asked to join us (very common thing for people to do).

On a side note, the final count for mooncakes this year: 4 boxes. That means I am the proud owner of 16 mooncakes, each one with more calories than a double quarter pounder with cheese, and each having enough preservatives to withstand nuclear fallout. Mmmm, tasty. Come visit and have one or 16, seriously. Today is the actual mid-Autumn festival day, so the 'for real' mooncake eating and moonwatching night....but there is a problem. This year, festival day happens to coincide with a holiday of rememberance of when the Japanese beat the Chinese at some battle, so I it is considered almost sacreligious to celebrate on such a day. Thus, the vast majority of mooncaking and ogling at the moon was done on Friday and Saturday.