english class

I had a dream last night. It was rather depressing. I dreamt that I woke up and checked the weather. That’s was it. It had warmed up, above freezing for the next two weeks at least. Warm front. I should be celebrating right? Wrong. Warm temperatures mean no ice snow or ice snow festival. Possibly one of the few redeeming aspects of Ha’erbin (I say possibly because I haven’t seen it yet). In the dream, I was devastated. I had bore over half a year of Ha’erbin life just waiting for this ice snow festival. How could the weather gods do this to me. I needed to get cold fast and stay that way. Turns out it was a dream. We have nice cold temperatures in the forecast. Today there are even 40mph wind gusts and snow! Might even call it a blizzard. It is pretty. I’m dreaming of a white china-mas.

I sat in on a two hour graduate level English class this week. Graduate level doesn’t mean the students are really good at English. In fact most cant speak a sentence. Graduate means they are graduate students. The way the class was taught made Chinese English abilities much easier to understand. This obviously doesn’t go for everyone, but at least for some of the younger generations in higher education. Many of these students can read and write English fairly well. Some well enough to get higher scores than me on some standardized test, like the GRE. Unfortunately few can speak fluid sentences or hold a conversation. Its not their fault. They just haven’t really practiced oral English, or had an opportunity to practice. This graduate English class made that clear. The class consisted of the teacher reading the text in English out loud. Then translating it into Chinese sentence by sentence, or calling on a student to translate it. So the students contact with English was simply reading by themselves and hearing their teacher read it. They didn’t actually say the English words or even have to try and understand them because the teacher or one of the students from the front of the class gave them the translation immediately after the English. Out of the 50 or so in the class, about 5 had to translate sentences and they were all in the first 2 of 10 rows. Pretty low chance of being called on, especially in the back. The story of the day was about a male ballot (pronounced like voting ballot) dancer and his cocaine overdose. A rather inappropriate and out of place story, I thought. Drugs are nowhere near a national topic here. There seldom spoken about and no one has done them or knows what they are. The translation for cocaine was simply ‘drug’ and snorting cocaine was simply ‘do drugs’.

Yummy things consumed this week.

煎饼果子,jian bing guozi, pretty common and eaten quite often by me. Consists of a very thin pancake made from only flour and water on a 2ft diameter iron griddle. Filled with fried egg, hot chili, cilantro, onions, hotdogs bits, hashbrowns and some fried bread chips. Delicious.

烤地瓜 roast whole sweet potato. Need not mention more. Served out of oil drum roaster.

包子 steamed buns filled with sauerkraut.

春饼 spring rolls, although not the deep fried things. These are Chinese burritos. Plate size thin pancakes again made from watery flour mixture. Then filled with an assortment of stirfry dishes like carrots and beef, sweet hot pork, tree ear fungus and egg.

I sent off a whole bundle of holiday cards last week. They should be arriving at various locations within three weeks time! If you have reason to believe you will not receive a card (ie I don’t have your address) send it to me and I will mail you a postcard during our little epic adventure coming up in Jan, feb, and march.

Attention Zhuhai!

珠海珠海！你是一个经常读者。我不想让你害怕了，但是如果您想，请给我发送一个电子邮件，让我知道你是谁。

Housing

Interesting contrast or inconsistency. When you think of china what do you think? Over 4000 years of civilized history?

Independent inventor of rice cultivation, black powder, printing blocks, paper, the compass, or shark fin soup? How about traditional buildings like the forbidden palace or Buddhist monasteries and Taoist or Confucius temples? Those things are all here. There are also scores of new buildings, temporary buildings, modern short lived buildings. The modern buildings outnumber the old by far. This last week I was talking about houses with some people and the issue of age came up. I hadn’t really paid much attention to the age of buildings or the role age played in the quality of buildings.
When a building was built plays a big role in the quality of the building and quality of the apartments within. Not only because building materials are better or more modern in newer buildings, but mostly because the wiring, plumbing, walls, doors, windows, and floors get old and degrade. When talking about the apartment you live in you definitely know in what year it was built and most people seems to have a pretty good idea what your apartment is like just from that. This is all pretty standard stuff. In the US it is about the same. You know a house built in the 70’s or 90’s is a bit different and when remodeling might be needed. The thing that is different here ~ the time scales… An apartment from ’98 is old. Not only is it old, it probably needs renovation and remodeling. The plumbing has probably rusted, the floors are not flat, and the walls might be cracking, molding, or slowly (quickly?) crumbling, and the windows definitely leak. This isn’t to mention that painting isn’t common here. Instead whitewashing is, and in high traffic areas like the university classrooms, it is a yearly process. I am not saying that everything 10 years old is falling down, but the perspective I got last week, was places 10 years old are not good, and you should probably find someplace newer.
Most of the buildings here have been built in the last 20 years, if not the last 15 or 10. China is reportedly to add millions of square meters of residential space every year. Every this relatively new, even though it may not appear that way. Buildings really do age quickly here. Probably do to a different maintenance paradigm, no maintenance in some cases.
On campus there were some one-story brick row houses on campus. That was at least until last week. Now there is one little row house. The rest were destroyed by a large front-end loader and carried off in a dump truck. The remaining house bears the scar of its neighbors on its east wall. The fate of the row houses has been long foreseen. They used to stand amongst a towering forest of 6-7 story apartments buildings providing housing to the university staff and faculty. The row houses were out of place and taking up valuable apartment building space. The last row house still stands because the inhabitant doesn’t want to move out and the university can’t force them out. So there is currently a standoff. Who knows how long it will last.
A similar process is also going on behind the university campus. What was farmland last week, is now being turned, compacted and prepared for construction of an expansion for the university. The fields were surrounded on all sides of apartment complexes and 6 lane roads; definitely out of place and again the eventual destruction/construction a long foreseen result. Development is a big force and consumes…

Big picture update:
Tiger Park (story)
Scenes
Nature
Strange

Generally any album with a recent date has new pictures.

Snippets from the last week or so…

Walking on campus the other day I noticed an elderly man sauntering towards me on the icy road. He had a big grin on his face visible even from far away. As he approached I noticed he was wearing a very stylish black leather ball cap (very popular among the elder males). Not only was the hat stylish it bore the brand “Homy” in big silver metal letters.

There are a few things are a bit hard to understand here. I will pick one for now. Polished marble floors. Many of the buildings on campus and in the city have shiny polished marble floors. They are even washed every night so they are bright and shiny for the next day. I think it is fine that companies want to up their image with fancy rocks. Unfortunately if you add a little water, snow, ice, or slush to a polished marble floor they become slick as ice, which is the exact state of the floors here for the duration of winter. It is quite amusing, although not terribly convenient. Indoor ice rinks are fun, but I suppose they are dangerous for the feeble and the hordes of high heel leather boot clad females. The situation might be improved with something of a welcome mat or runner separating the snow of the outside and the polished marble of the inside. But alas no such thing is common here and instead the inadvertent ice rinks prosper.

So there are no snow plows here…largely because it doesn’t snow that much. But there are also no sand trucks, and they have stopped using salt on the roads. So that means what falls generally stays. Also on the shady sides of buildings and mysteriously covering certain roads and intersections are inches of jumbled ice. Not smooth, rather hilly and rutted, but super slick. On campus the first year students are tasked with chipping away the foot packed snow from sidewalks and roads with flat shovels. It’s a big job…but there are at least several thousand freshmen to do it.

Went to the police/visa office yesterday to arrange a new visa. It was quite the place. Nothing like the Polson town hall where I originally got my passport. This place was bustling. Long snaking lines without much sense to them, people sitting and standing all over the place, several clerks working, several work stations empty, and the same thing repeated on all five floors. Keep in mind this is just Ha'erbin. I can't imagine what things in a Big city would be like. Surprisingly enough most people where there to get visa's to Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. There were very few foreigners, and very few Chinese applicants for new passports. Two hours later I walked out down a hundred dollars and on my way to a new visa. Aside from the long lines I remember the foot tall letters on the wall behind the clerks "Rigorously Enforce the Law Warmly Serve the People"
"严格执法 热情服务“

Dinner Extravaganza

Not going to lie, it has been cold. Frozen nose hairs and breath condensing and freezing into intricate ice crystals on the edges of my scarf.

There have been a few interesting developments in the last week, mostly centered around meeting the mayor of Ha’erbin for dinner last Sunday and again Wednesday.

A friend of a friend was visiting from the US last weekend. It just so happened that his father is music composer and happened to have some sort of business relations with a music publisher/ distributor here in Ha’erbin. It also turns out that the composer’s brother is a major in a large city in southern China, and the publisher/ distributor is possibly the mayor of Ha’erbin. I say possibly for three reasons. One, I only know her surname, two I cant seem to find her listed online, and there, of the locals I have asked, none have known the name of the mayor. She has held the position for 20 years, she said. I would assume someone would know. But, whatever, she says she is the mayor and has taken us out to dinner twice.

The first dinner was just my brother, our American friend and her visiting American friend (fluent in Cantonese and English), his cousin the interpreter (from Mandarin to Cantonese), the mayor and the mayor’s friend and college age daughter. It was quite the affair, semi awkward. Way too much food. There is a Chinese custom, unclear weather it is modern or traditional so it might not be fair to describe it as a custom, maybe better to say a practice; a practice to treating people to dinner, ordering extravagant amounts of food and not eating most of it. Apparently you must order outrageous amounts of food to demonstrate your commitment to doing business with your dinner guests (ie impress them by wasting food and money). If you don’t shovel food onto the table, your potential business partners will think you are not genuinely interested in making a deal with them. The monumental dinners are also used to sustain business relations, as in the case of this particular Sunday. The mayor apparently wanted one, to show respect for the visiting American’s father and politically powerful uncle, and two to smooth the road for distributing a new CD in southern china.

Dinner was good and we gorged. There were 20+ dishes of very well done Chinese food. Smoked eel, pig slaughter stew (sauerkraut with pig organs), sushi, various vegetable and meat stir fry dishes, crabs, cold Chinese style cold salads, bite size fish, boiled dumplings and on and on. Conversations varied, but were stunted by significant language barriers. The cousin, a native of Guangzhou, and fluent in Cantonese and partially fluent in Mandarin, gave translation to his visiting American cousin while I gave translation to my brother and our local American friend and vise versa to the mayor. I also tried to make small talk with the mayor’s friend and her daughter, while trying to tune out the English conversations my brother was having with the other two Americans. It was a bit hectic.

Wednesday the whole deal happened again. The mayor picked us up and drove us to another fancy restaurant, a seafood restaurant. I had not seen a restaurant like this before, it was very upscale. Our table wasn’t just a table, it was a room. The building had been designed very similar to a hotel. Our room had a closet for coats, its own bathroom, a couch and a big round table for 12. The table could have easily been replaced with a bed if the restaurant went under, or needed to host a conference. In attendance were my brother, our local American friend, the mayor, 4 dudes (“the man” sort of dudes, older, super fat, politically powerful, wealthy, and self acknowledging), a music composer, and two college music professors. One of the dudes was possibly the provincial minister of education, one was a director for CCTV (Central China TV, the main 10+ channels nationally), and the other two held high level university administration jobs. This meal was much less awkward. My brother and our American friend mostly talked to each other, while I listened and joined in where I could with the larger Chinese conversation. As it turns out, everyone but the music student were old friends, often go out to dinner with each other, and frequently play mahjong. Dinner was equally extravagant, but less was ordered, so we actually managed to finish about 50% of it. Since it was a seafood restaurant, fishy things were on center stage. Nothing too fishy though, fish, shrimp (both fried and raw), sushi, squid, abalone, scallops, and other strange sea creatures unidentifiable and with confusing Chinese names. It was all really good, although raw shrimp are just too slimy and cold to be really desirable.

I was a bit hesitant about going to the second dinner. I can’t help but thinking the mayor had some underlying motive, which she still might have. Her stated purpose was to introduce us to more people in Ha’erbin, which she accomplished. She also said that our American friend should tutor the two music teachers in conversation English, which they probably could use. One of the music said one sentence in English, “my English poor.” The other one sang a sentence or two “I want to study oral English,” although it was unclear whether the singing was intentional or just an unfortunately funny accent.

On the ride home, after talking to the major’s driver for some time as he ‘accidentally’ took two wrong turns and doubled our driving time by driving 30km/h for most of the way, he asked for my phone number and invited my brother and I go drinking and eat lamb kabobs over the next weekend.

Last night my brother, another American, and a Chinese guy, his girlfriend and I went to Pizza hut. It was pretty much Pizza hut in the states, with some major differences. In China, pizza hut is a nice restaurant. Very clean and expensive (relatively, it’s about the same as the US price). The pizza’s are cooked in the same style as in the US, but the toppings are different. Very different. We had a curry chicken pizza with chicken some vegetables and curry saucy instead of tomato sauce and a salmon seafood pizza, with raw salmon, squid shrimp, wasabi, and a white cream sauce instead of tomato sauce. Both were pretty good. There was also Chinese style potato salad which was not good.