Hello again!
Sorry I've been a bit lagging in my posting. Turns out I've actually gotten a bit busy, and now I have real things to do, like figuring out lesson plans and what not. Silly. I guess since the last time I posted, I have actually started teaching. I am teaching Junior 1, the equivalent of 7th grade. My students are 11, 12, and 13, and mostly adorable. The first week was a lot of fun. I mostly just talked about where I was from and showed them a lot of pictures from home. They were all totally enthralled, though I feel like they may have only understood about half of what I said. The level of English of my students is varied, but all around a bit lower than I originally had thought it might be. It's hard trying to figure out what they know and what they don't. I'll think something will be difficult, and then it turns out they get it in seconds. But then other things go straight over their head. I think it'll just take more time to really fine-tune my lessons. My first week of class we had teacher's day, which is a day in China where all the students honor their teachers. So either before or after class all the students in the class would stand and say "happy teacher's day" in unison. It was rather sweet. They also gave me gifts, like a flower and a pencil holder and a couple of cards. Which was nice considering some of the students hadn't even had me as a teacher yet at that point. It does get a bit exhausting though. At least I only teach one lesson plan a week- 22 different times. And I have over 600 students. So that part is a bit rough. At least the students are all different and help keep things interesting.

Okay, enough about that, time to talk about something else...A couple of weekends ago all us foreign teachers attended a huge mass wedding at one of the other campuses. Fourteen couples (all teachers in the Zhengzhou Foreign Language School complex) tied the knot in the most confetti filled wedding I have ever seen. I don't have too much to say about the ceremony. The dresses were white and huge, the hair was huge, glitter was quite liberally applied, and I believe an entire backstreet boys album was played at least twice during the course of the ceremony. It reminded me a lot of an 80's prom, but perhaps a little tackier and with more bowing. My opinion of the whole affair might also have been influenced by the fact that I understood about 0% of what was going on. Still, it was fun. The reception,though, is where things really got interesting. I had my first shots of "bijo" (this is how you pronounce it, I don't know how to spell it.) This is a rice alcohol of a similar potency as everclear, and tastes worse, and unfortunately there are many traditions that make you drink it against your will. Such as, if someone of authority toasts you, you must toast back, and you cannot stop drinking until he stops (if these rules are wrong, I apologize. There were a lot of them, and they were explained to me while drinking large quantities of the aforementioned liquor. Consequently, some of the details are a bit fuzzy.) We also were served fish, which we spun on the table, and whoever the head pointed to had to take four shots, and the two people the tail pointed to had to take six. Guess who was one of the lucky ones on the tail end. You guessed it. Consequently, this was also the first night I learned what bijo tastes like when it comes back up.

The dinner at the reception was similarly interesting. We were served (and I'm not making this up): chicken feet and heads, tripe (pig intestine stuffed with vegetables), congealed duck blood and duck intestine soup, and donkey meat. Also cucumbers, and some thing I was told was fruit. I didn't eat anything but the cucumbers and fruit, and also one piece of the duck blood (which was a similar texture as tofu, but a rather different flavor.)

Well, this is getting long, and I don't have many more interesting things to say. Mostly I've just been working and being lame. We haven't had the chance to do any other travelling yet, because we haven't really had time, and also our passports were taken so that they could obtain us our residence permits. We are finally supposed to be getting them back later this week. Then I'll finally be able to leave the city without fear of deportation. Which will be nice. Hope all is well at home, and that you all are enjoying the fall weather. It's been pretty cool and really rainy here. Though I haven't seen any evidence of any trees changing color. I'm not sure if that's something that happens here or not. It's likely with all the pollution the leaves just turn brown...I guess I'll find out!

Photo website

I'm too tired to write anything more right now but wanted to let you know that I finally got some pictures online. Here is the link to my photo website:

http://picasaweb.google.com/achpeterson

Enjoy.

The Fair Green City

I would love to include pictures in this post, or at the very least a link to a photo website, but I recently realized that I either forgot or lost my camera cord which would allow my to transfer my pictures to my computer. So, until I figure out how to rectify this situation, you will have to use your imagination.

I will help attempt to help a bit. Zhengzhou (more or less phonetically pronounced: jung-joe) is a city of about 7 million people. This is roughly the size of New York City. It is, umm, rather large, and there are a lot of people in it. Conesquently, I won't lie, it doesn't smell to great. I live in downtown Zhengzhou, about a 15 min walk away from the central square called The Green Square. "The Green City" is Zhengzhou's nickname, and while I would not exactly call it 'green' there are a fair number of trees and flowers in the medians and quite a few beautifully manicured parks, ringed with oh so picturesque skyscrapers (the parks really are pretty, the buildings, not so much.) As far as litter, the sidewalks and streets are pretty clean. The air, however, is not. I have been here for about two weeks now, and in those two weeks I have seen blue sky on just two occasions. One night I even saw roughly three stars, it was exhilarating. In this city, everything, everywhere, is under construction. Between every 20 story building there is a rubble heap of what once was a 15 story building in the process of being replaced by another even larger building. Everywhere, chunks of sidewalk and street are missing, in the process of being replaced by, I'm not sure...nicer sidewalk, I guess.

It feels very safe here. I never feel nervous walking around, and I really enjoy how many people are out on the streets at all hours of the day. If you go for a walk in the morning, you are bound to see the parks full of people doing tai chi, in the afternoons, it's old men squatting in circles on every street corner playing cards or a type of Chinese dominoes. Underneath the cover of an elevated roadway, lines of pool tables and card tables can be found. It's not unusual to see some fancy glossy looking car parked next to a bicycles vendor selling live chickens from crates. In the evening, dancing classes occur in every large plaza or park. It's really quite odd, as often times you'll happen upon 15 couples practicing ballroom dancing in the open space in front of the super market. It was at one such similar class that one of the other foreign teachers from the U.S. met a very friendly police woman, who, along with her 15 year old nephew and translator, took us to the local museum and then the Chinese Youth Palace for a rousing game of ping pong. They love their ping pong here, this is no lie.

I was quit amused by "Homeland" our 15 year old translator. I especially liked his name. I'm guessing it was probably a translation of his actual Chinese name, but any way, it was at least unique. Many people here will adopt an English name, and will introduce themselves with only their English name to foreigners. The names they choose are sometimes pretty funny. I've met a number of young girls name Avril (she's huge in China) as well as Avril Two ("because my best friend is named Avril") along with Little Bear and Tiger and a number of Harry Potters. Homeland had about a million questions for us, mostly about New York. He watches a lot of Friends to improve his English, and is consequently bound and determined to move to, and live in, New York City for the rest of his life. I think he thought I was pretty lame because I'd never been there, and because he'd never heard of Colorado before.

I am also very amused by Chinglish. Many park signs, clothing and food packaging has English labeling on them, which usually makes no sense, but are often entertaining. Some of my favorite examples include a package of drinking straws I saw at a grocery store that were labeled as "hygienic drink suckers", or a park sign asking us to "plead treasure the flowers and the plants and safeguard environmental sanitation" (misspellings and all). I guess I just find it so funny because it's rare for me to actually be capable of reading anything in this country, and when I do happen across English, I'm amused that it also makes no sense.

I'm tired now and can't think of many more interesting things to say. I didn't teach again this week (reason=unknown) but have been told I will be actually working next week. We'll see I guess. I've learned not to worry about it, that's just the way things work in China.

I am alive!

I would like to apologize to all of my awaiting fans. I just finally got internet in my room on Thursday, and therefore was not able to post any updates before now. I don’t know if anyone is actually reading this, but I’ll go ahead and update anyway. At least I’ll read it... maybe.

So, as you have probably guessed by now, I arrived in China safe and sound. The flight wasn’t nearly as bad as I had anticipated. I mean, it was still 25 hours of travel, but somewhere around the time when I was eating in- flight meals at 2 am and realizing that my entire 15 hour flight from LA to Beijing took place completely in the dark, time stopped making sense. We got into Beijing at 4am, lost everyone who’d been on our flight, and walked the entire length of the giant (and really quite beautiful) Beijing airport without seeing a single soul. This was quite odd. Really, the only miserable part of the trip was the 7 hour layover waiting for our flight to Zhengzhou. But I made it!

And now a bit about my accommodations. The school that I am working for has multiple campuses throughout the city. I am living and working at the Zhengzhou Foreign Language Middle School, which is located in downtown Zhengzhou. Three other foreign (i.e. American) teachers that live at this campus with me, while there are six foreign teachers located at the campus in the High Tech Development Zone. We each have our own apartments, which are nice, but feel a lot like dorms. The high tech campus has a much nicer campus. Though it's a trade off, as my apartment was equipped with a brand new computer and flat screen tv, so I can’t really complain. Unfortunately all the channels are in Chinese (shocking) and the internet has such heavy censorship that I can’t even actually access this blog without a little help. I also have a brand new washing machine, which I have yet to figure out how to work. My life would really be much easier if I could only speak and read Mandarin.

China is amusing in its dichotomy. My apartment has a brand new flat screen TV, but the plumbing in my kitchen is nothing but a plastic tube that stretches from underneath my sink to a hole the wall. It constantly falls out and dumps the kitchen waste water onto my floor. This is not my favorite thing. At least things are cheap. Dinner for 8-9 people generally runs around 115 RMB or so. This comes out to roughly $2 a person. These are not small meals either, usually we order about 5-6 dishes along with rice and noodles. Also, the food is awesome. My favorite is a delicious eggplant dish. I eat it a lot because so far it's the only food I know how to say. That and tofu. The food is nothing like Chinese food in the states, though you do get unexpected surprises like chicken heads or cake sprinkles on the top of your dish (though I’m pretty sure the sprinkles were a special add on because we were American).

I’ve only been here a week and I feel like I’ve got so much to say. I guess I’ll just touch on the major points. Point one, being a white person here is like being a celebrity. Maybe not in the best of ways. People openly stare, they point, they grab their children and shout, they try to touch you, they take your picture, but they do call you beautiful all of the time (and this is not creepy men but small children and women), which is really an esteem booster. But they are also quite blunt. Some of the other foreign teachers have told me that their students often ask them in class why they are fat, or if they have any plans to lose weight. Not so subtle, these Chinese.

Point two. The kids here work like crazy. Part of this is because my school is the top school in the province. It’s the school that all of the party members send their children to (hence, why they can afford to hire 10 foreign teachers from the United States). Anywho, the students start school at about 7 am, and generally have classes until about 7 at night. Though they do get a three hour lunch and mandatory siesta, which is nice. I was expecting to have class this week, but it turns out that my grade was sent off to military training this week, so I didn’t have to teach. Apparently this is common, and the children attend a boot-camp like training for a week at the beginning of the year to prepare them for the rigors of the school year ahead. Whatever, I got the week off.

Hmm, I have so much more to say, but I’ll spare you. Instead, I’ll leave you with this one last thought: ass-less chaps. People here do not use diapers for their young children. Instead, they put them in "split-pants" (pants that are split at the crotch, in case you didn't catch that) which, sorry to be crude, are nothing more than baby ass-less chaps. This way, when a baby or young child needs to potty, they will just go spread eagle in the middle of the sidewalk, and their attentive parent will lay some newspaper beneath them. They do this even for tiny infants, though I don’t understand how that could be effective. Needless to say, I’ve seen much more baby-butt than I’d ever imagined I’d see in just a week in China.

I hope everything is well at home. I am doing well. We’ve got some big plans for the weekend including my first KTV experience (karaoke) followed by a trip to a club called Baby Body (where I hear there are fire-breathers). Should be interesting...

Hello all, and welcome!

As you may have guessed from my most creative title, I am moving to China! Tomorrow.
For those of you who don't know, I'm going there to teach conversational English to 6-7th graders (I think) for ten months. And, in answer to the most common questions that arise when people first hear this information: no, I have never been to China before; no, I don't speak Mandarin Chinese or any Chinese dialect for that matter; no, I have no formal training as a teacher, no, I have no idea what I am doing, and yes, I realize that I just broke a number of rules of punctuation in that sentence, but I don't care.

I don't have much to say yet, but wanted to let you know it is here that I'll be posting updates of my trials and tribulations. I think this is better than attempting to send out mass emails to people who might not give a damn. So check back regularly, and hopefully I'll have something interesting to say to make it worth your while.

However, I hope to still hear from all of you, so be sure to email, write, call (once I figure out how to make that work) or whatever you prefer. I don't intend for this to be a substitute for that, I just figured this was the easiest way to keep people who are interested informed.

I guess that's about all I have to say. Tomorrow I start the 25 hour treck across the globe. Wish me luck.