Just a few quick photos of some kids. First, the big ones at the university in the student union. It probably comes as no surprise that the place is filled with ping pong tables:
And then, here’s a quick shot of Susan visiting a local orphanage:
Of course, in a city of over 5 million people, there are plenty of kids…
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Well, the dishwasher isn’t exactly new, but the dishes are. We have finally made the great leap from paper and plastic dishes to ceramic and steel. It was challenging to find dishes that are typical for an American diet, because all of the ones that come in a set include a number of bowls but no large plates.
We finally saw our first “Chinese lawnmower” last week as well. Too bad we didn’t get a photo, but just imagine four people wearing straw hats bent over with scythes and scissors, and you can get a good mental picture of your own. It also seems appropriate at this point to include a photo of our clothes dryer in action:
We actually cleaned the porch over the weekend and are considering a small patio furniture set. Although it seems a bit odd to be looking across to another bank of apartments, the weather is nice enough here to entice you to sit outside. It will also be considerate of us to give the neighbors a clear view of the “laowài” (foreigners) living in their building. Speaking of Chinese, today was a red-letter day. Mark actually told a taxi driver the name of our apartments in Chinese and we ended up at the right place!
In the category of “be careful what you ask,” Mark was recently talking with a fellow teacher in the offices at school. He noticed the debris floating around in her tea decanter and asked her about it. She told him of the “flower tea” that many teachers drink and said she would prepare some for him, quickly pulling a bag of stuff from beneath her desk. Into his empty decanter went various seeds, roots, pods, and dried flowers. Topped off with a generous supply of hot water, it steeped on the desktop until ready for consumption. And compared to some of the things we’ve consumed here, it wasn’t too bad. Of course, Mark’s been struggling with some intestinal problems for the past few days, but it could’ve been any number of other things (you never know)…
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It’s been about ten days since we moved into our new apartment, so we’re finally getting around to posting a few photos of the place. The apartment is 123 square meters (1324 square feet), so it’s big enough for you to come and visit. Although the area seems pretty safe, the apartment complex is gated and guarded, and each building has its own automatic door system controlled by a residential intercom system:
We live on the third floor of building number 3, door number 6. In China, the law requires all buildings over 6 stories to have an elevator, so you find a bunch of 6 story buildings. We’re glad to be low enough that we don’t have to climb all the way to the top each time.
If you look to the left just before you enter the door to our stairwell, you’ll see our downstairs neighbor’s courtyard. While many of the apartment courtyards have elegant fishponds or patio sets, our neighbor has … chickens! Fortunately, they aren’t noisey at night and he doesn’t have a rooster. If we get to know him, perhaps he’ll share some fresh eggs with us.
We have a new appreciation for why Chinese people remove their shoes when they enter their homes (if you walk on our sidewalks, you’ll understand too). Our small refrigerator is in the entrance hallway, along with our bottled water supply:
We have a typical kitchen with two gas burners. Very few kitchens here have genuine ovens, so we recently bought a toaster oven and will try to use it for baking regular (American) food. You may hear more about that in a future post.
Other than the close proximity to campus, one of the things that attracted us to this apartment was the spacious den and dining areas. It seems like a good place for folks to gather, and we hope to use it effectively in the future. The owner left some furniture for us which has saved a lot of shopping in the near term.
The master bedroom has a traditional Chinese bed (hard as a rock), so we are glad to have our Thermarest(r) pads under a duvet and mattress pad to make it soft enough for our American bodies. It’s also good that the owner left an armoire for us so that we can finally have a place to hang our clothing.
The spare bedroom is pink and is pretty empty at this point:
Our “study” contains some of the owner’s old furniture. We didn’t want it, but had to allow it to remain as a compromise. We are hoping to get his permission to paint and repair it, making it more acceptable for use. Susan found out (the hard way) that the left legs on the old desk are not attached. She was moving it to clean the floor and it collapsed on her. Fortunately, the large plate glass on the top didn’t break:
Our bathrooms both pose a challenge. The master bath has a large tub with a hand-held shower arrangement that isn’t long enough for a tall American, and the water controls are very finicky (either hot or cold, rarely a mix). If you take a shower, the water runs down the walls alongside the tub, supposedly to the floor drain beneath. That would work really well if the floor drain was actually the low point on the floor. Unfortunately, the water tends to run out from under the tub and puddle in various places. If it were my house, I’d ditch the tub and put in a standard shower. The good news is that it has a toilet you can sit on!
The second bathroom actually has a regular shower, but like many small bathrooms here (and in Europe), there is no shower stall so everything gets wet. And like the master bath, the floor drains aren’t in the low points. We put up a shower curtain and will try to install a floor ridge to keep the water on one side (it would be nice to step out onto a dry spot after a shower). Of course, like many things Chinese, the previous owner’s daughter decorated it with cartoon characters:
Susan’s working hard to make the place comfortable: scrubbing floors, walls, and furniture, washing curtains, organizing our scant possessions, etc. We bought some dishes, a toaster and a microwave oven today (yeah!), so things are starting to look like home. Not the kind of home that we’re used to, but we’re thankful to have such a nice place to live in a part of the world where many folks have so little.
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Now that we have finally settled into our apartment (more to come on that), it’s time to improve my transportation options. The walk to school isn’t too bad – only about 17 minutes at a brisk pace. But if I had a bike, it would only take about half that long (including carrying it up and down stairs).
We visited with a friend on Friday, and it turns out that his old bike had been stolen on Wednesday. Since he was previously a fairly serious road biker, he had already been eyeing a new set of wheels at the local Giant store. We joined him on a quick trip there to see if there might be anything for us (remember, Giant bikes are made in China/Taiwan).
There is a strong tension here when it comes to buying a bike. Part of me would like to get a nice, lightweight mountain bike to make it easier to carry up the four flights of stairs to my office. But the other part of me is keenly aware that bike theft in this city is a finely tuned science (everyone I know has had several bikes stolen). Our campus is also right next to some pretty awesome mountains, and I’ve heard that there are trails in “them thar hills,” evidenced by some bike clubs who ride in that direction on the weekends. Unfortunately, our trip to this bike shop was not particularly fruitful. It turns out that there were only two frames in the entire shop that would fit my size, and they were both clunky and heavy. I decided to take a smaller frame out for a quick spin (it has been so long!), but found that the shock quickly bottomed out when I jumped the curb:
I’ve heard that there are some better bike shops downtown near the major universities. Maybe we’ll take a trip there before deciding to buy a theft-resistant, rusty gray second-hand bike from a local dealer. It sure would be nice to have some suspension for banging over the obstacles in the alleyway between our apartment and the main road heading toward the school (with a lockout shock, a solid crank set, disc brakes…).
But just when you think that everything in China is small, think again. Last week as we were heading out the door to look for a toaster oven for our new apartment (they don’t have traditional full-size ovens here), I took a quick measurement of the appointed spot in our kitchen – 18 inches wide. When we got to the store, I grabbed a tape measure from the hardware aisle to narrow our search to just the ovens that would fit. Of course, the only tape measures were metric, so I did the quick math: 18 * 2.54 = 45 cm. We found an oven that would work, but when we got it home, it was significantly smaller than the spot. I couldn’t figure out what went wrong until I looked at my Chinese tape measure:
I’m still not sure what units of measure this represents, but it’s clearly not the inches that we are familiar with. Perhaps someone finds value in having a ruler where inches are 38% longer than those I grew up with.
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(Warning! This post could be dangerously boring for non-analytical readers!)
As I prepare for another two solid days of teaching, here are a few thoughts about my classes and students. I have two different sections of students meeting on separate days, about 50 in each group. Each day (Monday and Tuesday), I teach two Negotiating classes in the morning and two International Marketing classes in the afternoon. The Tuesday classes get the benefit of my learnings from Monday. Here is a photo of each class (the back of Tuesday and the front of Monday):
The kids are a pleasure to work with, very respectful and give the appearance of understanding (even when they are clueless). As with most Chinese classes, they have an amazing ability to repeat things in unison. Since many of them struggle with English, we always spend the first half of the first class reviewing the vocabulary words that will appear in the actual subject lesson. It’s interesting to hear their loud and clear annunciation as they repeat the words after me. (Click Here for Student Responses)
As I mentioned in a previous post, the university attempted to divide their International Trade students based on English competence, giving me the students with the best English and placing the others in a Chinese version of the same subjects. Unfortunately, they used a national business English test (known as the CET4) as the basis for this sorting process. The chart below shows that they were indeed successful in selecting the top half of the distribution for my class:
Unfortunately, there is almost no correlation between the student CET4 scores and their oral English capability (as measured by an English teacher):
This fact has been borne out in the students’ tests and class participation. I suppose that this is every teacher’s challenge: to help the best students develop to their full potential, to challenge those in the middle, and to avoid losing the ones at the bottom. With that in mind, I always take an anonymous poll at the end of each class to test for comprehension. This is my way of checking if any changes in class structure and activities are moving in the right direction. Based on this chart, we’re making some progress:
While this poll helps give a macro trend for adjusting my teaching approaches, the real improvement (I hope) should come next week. Tomorrow, I will finally be taking delivery of a portable “Classroom Response System” from the eInstruction company (after disqualifying a local company that suggested we avoid taxes by a direct cash payment). This system provides a remote control “clicker” to each student, allowing me to collect real time samples of comprehension, repeating a topic if necessary to be sure we get it right. The system also enables live testing with instant results since each clicker has a unique student ID code, saving a lot of time grading tests and reducing the level of cheating. More to come later on the effectiveness of this system.
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We’re now in the process of preparing our new apartment for residence. The apartment grounds and gardens are quite nice – somewhat of a respite from the storm of China. Our building is one of the shorter ones on the interior of the complex and provides some acoustical isolation from the constant sound of construction and traffic outside. Here is the walkway to our doorway:
The entrance way is also graced with a very unusual statue posed in the center of a non-functioning fountain:
We spent a good deal of today cleaning the apartment. Even though this apartment was cleaner than the others that we saw, there is still MUCH to do in order to make it feel like home. As an example of the kind of cleaning required, here’s what Susan swept out from under the bathroom vanity:
We also bought a used refrigerator and clothes washer from a friend today. We were blessed to have another Chinese friend help us pick them up with his van. On the way there, we got stuck in a traffic gridlock, so in typical Chinese fashion, our friend did a 5 point turn and drove up onto the sidewalk and around the snarl. Living here adds new meaning to the phrase “if you don’t like my driving, stay off the sidewalk.”
Of course, the appliances here all tend be on the small size. This is good, since our 3rd floor apartment doesn’t have an elevator (I could just barely manage getting the fridge up the stairs). Our new clothes washer is pretty small (5kg load limit) and only has a cold water inlet. This gives Susan the “opportunity” to fill buckets of hot water and dump them in when washing whites. And she doesn’t need to worry about spilling anything since the clothes washer resides on the back porch (I’ll restrain myself from West Virginia jokes since Tommy may be reading this blog):
Fortunately for us, our new apartment also came with a clothes dryer (on the front porch):
It’s usually hot and windy here, so I think this dryer will serve us well.
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Today, we began moving to Cambridge! But probably not the one you are thinking about in Boston or England. Our new apartment complex is called “Dream in Cambridge.” It’s probably an investment by some forward thinking real estate investor at Harvard Business School. Of course, you have to have a pretty colorful dream to connect Cambridge with this part of China.
It’s going to take a lot of work to clean it up, but we are thankful for a place which is relatively close to our school. It’s on the main bus line (for rainy days), and about a 15 minute walk to my teaching building. I took a few pictures from the 15th floor of our hotel and stiched them together to show the proximity of our new “Xiao Qu” (apartment complex – green arrow) to the teaching building (with the red arrow):
More pictures to come in the next post.
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This will be a boring blog, but some of you have asked where we’re presently staying. Tomorrow will be our 20th day in a local hotel. It’s actually nice and unusually clean and only costs about $17 a day (up from $15 in October). It’s even walking distance from our school! We’re very thankful for it.
The only drawback so far is that a couple of mornings we didn’t have hot water and almost every night (sometimes in the middle of the night!), a busload of people (domestic tourists, perhaps?) loudly make their way down our hallway to their rooms. No matter what time you go to sleep here, expect to be awakened by 7:00am–the time the city broadcasts its wake-up call. It’s a good thing we’re early risers! Click here to hear our Wakeup Call.
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An amazing thing happened today – we signed the contract for an apartment! Normally in a city of 5 million people, such an event wouldn’t seem to be so amazing. But when that city is quickly growing to 8 million people and many old apartments have been demolished to make room for new ones, the demand has dramatically outstripped supply.
There isn’t a central clearinghouse for apartment rentals in our city, so the process starts by traveling from one apartment complex to the next and visiting the real estate offices. Sometimes we walk and sometimes we ride – here’s a picture of Susan riding to see an apartment with a friend.
The real estate offices usually have just a few apartments for rent, 
but often will try to use “bait and switch” tactics to get you to look at something that is quite different than what you might actually be interested in. Each complex will often have quite a few of these storefront operations, each with limited access to what might actually be available. After a week of searching, we had only viewed a few apartments (unacceptable ones) before finding the right one for us.
The owners are moving out to live with their newly married daughter, something that is not unusual in China. They seemed glad to have a foreign teacher and his wife as tenants, trusting that we will work to keep the place clean and in good condition. We were wonderfully blessed to have the help of a Chinese friend (Kevin) in the negotiation and contract writing/signing process. Here’s a picture of Susan “authorizing” her signature (who needs a notary public when you have a thumbprint?).
And here are the happy landlords and tenants posing for a photo in the apartment. They plan to spend ten days cleaning out their stuff before we move in. Since they are moving over to their daughter’s house, they are willing to leave behind any furnishings that we need (and we are willing to have them!).
After the deal was done, Kevin treated us to a wonderful celebration dinner at a local hotpot restaurant. We are grateful for good friends who have helped us so much as we seek to settle down in our new city. And we are especially thankful to the One who has provided us with a decent apartment so close to our school (about 15 minute walk).
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Our last post reflected on the comfort derived from our familiar foods, most of which were brought from home. But those won’t last forever, so we’re trying to learn to shop locally for things we need. As we’re staying in the hotel, our “local market” happens to be a convenience store in one of the stalls beneath the neighboring apartment complex. If you’ve ever wondered where out-of-date food ends up, well, your curiousity can be satisfied by stopping in here.
On Friday, we joined a new friend in the open-air market near an apartment complex that we are considering. Fortunately for us, our friend speaks very good Chinese and understands the challenges faced by newbies like us. When you’re having trouble communicating, there’s nothing like an advocate who can stand in the gap!
There is a lot to see at the market, even on a slow Friday afternoon. You can select your own chicken or rabbit for dinner (remember, this is not a pet store):
There are all kinds of interesting people here as well, including three generations of sales ladies (it’s hard to see the littlest one in the papoose pack):
And there are people selling, people buying, people cooking, and people chillin’:
After shopping in the market, we stopped in at a local “cafe” for lunch. Our friend shared some wise counsel about selecting restaurants in China – if you like the food and you don’t get sick, it’s probably a good place to come back to. It’s been 30 hours and we’re still OK, so this one might be a keeper!
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