Happy Year of the Dragon

新年快乐！

(Happy Chinese New Year!)

About half a year overdue, I know, but here is some news from Tianjin and China, which is still where I’m based, and where I’m trying to make it big, (as the most famous tall white man in Asia):

Right now our Chinese New Year (or Spring Festival) school holiday is drawing to a close. Super relaxing week off which has mostly been spent in a sedentary position, either consuming food, or thinking about where we might next consume food. Aside from gastronomic musings, I have of course been racking my brains for some good memories (and photos) from the last 6 months that I can share with you in blog form. And what better place to start than some classic Chinglish! A whole year on, and this stuff still gets me giggling.  A recent restaurant I went to had some great titles, but unfortunately I had no camera. I’ll go back of course, because the names are too good not to share, but this time I might just steal the whole menu. (One I can remember was a dish simply called ‘Promise of an Ostrich’. Not a bird in sight. And a supermarket I went to sold a large box of something called ‘Essence of Black Chicken’. hmmm…)

(edit:) 'Exceedingly Charming Food Street'. It was charming, but not exceedingly so.

More than just a bun in the oven.

I can't take credit for this one, but it's a winner.

Er...what?

It's long, but there's so much. Personal fave in here: "No gang warfare".

And of course this great country is still producing more farcically named English students, something I’ve been told is popular back home. Unfortunately I haven’t had the opportunity to name any new ones, (and Kill is resolutely sticking with her current moniker. If you’re reading this, Kill, I think it’s time for a change!) But who cares when you’ve got Limcon, Aslan, Kerwin, Arnolder, Mango, Friend, a 7-year-old boy called Huxley, a rather heavy-set young lad called Pony, and my personal fave, a 4-year-old called ULTRAMAN!!! (And his parents are ok with this apparently.)

So what actually happens during Spring Festival? It’s all about the fireworks and firecrackers. (The latter doesn’t involve any visual display; it’s just like the sound of a rifle going off. It takes about 5 seconds to get through a clip of about a thousand I’m told). Practically every street corner has a temporary firework stall set up, and the impossibility of getting a good morning’s sleep this holiday has led me to believe the vendors are doing a pretty good trade. If Barack or the North Koreans were ever thinking of launching a surprise invasion over here, now would be a good time to do it. Compared to the deafening noise of the fireworks, a full-on military air strike would be about as noticeable as a fart in a gale force 10 hurricane.

Escargots on the go; restaurants leave all their produce in pitifully small tubs awaiting slaughter.

Not a bunch to pooh-pooh any superstitions, the Chinese set them off all through the day and well past midnight to keep the evil spirits at bay. (I thought the Internet censorship was doing a pretty good job already.) The skyline here is constantly erupting and booming, a sight as impressive as it is pointless. Another ridiculously over-the-top but well-adhered-to superstition is that you must not get your hair cut during Spring Festival. Otherwise, quite simply and in no uncertain terms, your uncle will die. Great for hairdressers as they never have to work over the holiday.

For New Year’s Eve itself, I was lucky enough to be invited to a Chinese colleague’s house for dinner with her parents and, naturally, the setting off of more fireworks. I guess this is the equivalent of being invited over for dinner on the 25^th of December back home, so I considered myself pretty lucky. Me and fellow teacher Greg were given a lesson in the (difficult) art of making dumplings, which is the traditional food of New Year. Greg’s allergies meant he couldn’t actually eat them, so not wanting to appear impolite I set about eating a 2-man share, which I think was well over 20. So delicious; great food memories right there.

Christina (aforementioned colleague) and her parents ate considerably less, but her chain-smoking dad sure could put away the báijiǔ​ (rice wine)! The stuff came in a plastic bottle that would have looked more at home containing white spirit, and looking back I probably would have rather drunk white spirit. Christina’s dad poured himself a whole mug of this fiery stuff and just sipped at it with his food, (the champ!), but a small shot was enough for me, as it must have been at least 60%. It was the kind of stuff where one sniff makes you want to gag, while actually drinking it leaves a healthy burn and a sinful aftertaste in your throat for a half hour. It did, however, make the conversation flow between me and the old boy, even though he just spoke in rapid and heavily accented Chinese, while I just sat there not understanding a single word. It doesn’t matter how different the cultures are, or how great the language barrier, booze and food really are unwavering in their ability to unite and encourage social activity.

So Christina’s dad soon passed out on the sofa, (by the way, he had been wearing his pyjamas all evening; a good choice of outfit when you’re drinking something that could knock you out at any minute) but not for long as the fireworks kicked off in earnest at midnight, which we went outside to witness. Temporary deafening ensued, and it was so loud you couldn’t even hear all the car alarms that were being set off from the reverberations. (I will have to a get video up of it soon, and some photos from that evening from Greg.) But then it was back out of the cold to go polish off the dumplings, which dad was eating with raw, whole cloves of pickled garlic. I tried one, and, needless to say, my breath was extremely aromatic for the next 24 hours.

Downtown Tianjin has some very out of place looking old European villas from colonial times. Many are being restored to former glory like this gem.

Although this time of year should be a joyous occasion for every Chinese family, I think the younger generation, as they do with many things in life, don’t seem to get as enthused by it all as their parents would like. They’re all only children for a start, so a family dinner is only ever going to be 3 strong, (and maybe grandparents) and they are the sole representative of their generation. Many have to travel back to their smaller hometowns if they’ve come to a big city like Tianjin to work, and with China being a generously proportioned land, a train ride home can be a 20 hour plus affair. And getting a ticket is no easy business either, as they are only released 2 weeks before travel. My Chinese teacher made 100 calls before eventually getting through to an operator for hers, and many are simply stuck and don’t make it home. And being the generation of all things electronic, gaming and social networking, a week at home in your parents’ internet-free house sounds like torture for many. Maybe they just need some super-strength rice wine to cheer them up.

Hope you are all well back home, more coming soon…

The stuff that China is famous for

Serious queues in Beijing. This is to see Mao's Mausoleum.

This still photo doesn't do justice to the sheer gusto of this bizarre ritual.

4 months I’d held out, but last week I finally succumbed to my first bout of food induced sickness. Shame that it had to happen on EF’s teambuilding weekend out of the city (where their food actually made a load of western teachers sick), but at least I had an air-conditioned room to recover in. Mine was street food induced and I guess eating it will get you eventually, but it’s too good and too damn convenient to avoid. Plus if you go on a Saturday around 6:30pm, you might catch the adjacent hairdressing salon’s weekend dance show. This is when their twenty plus staff (just as many men as women) take to the street for a synchronised public über-pop dance routine of an atrociously camp nature. I think the look of bewilderment pasted on the faces of the local old men and women, trying to enjoy their rice wine over a game of cards, says it all. Clearly they find all the mincing in sparkling clothing quite disorientating, and it’s a funny snapshot of how styles and culture in this country have changed between two generations very drastically indeed.

Hitting some bars in Beijing

But before all that I was talking about Beijing. I think I’ll be heading back there for one last trip before it gets totally and utterly over run with tourists all summer. Also moving to six-day weeks won’t give me much time. Plus, it’s just a change of scenery, and a good place to unwind over some food and drinks. Which of course means sampling the local legend, Beijing kaoya: Beijing roast duck. Quite different to the shredded variety back home, and one reason is the way it is served. I mean how could you possible enjoy your bird unless you’d seen it brought out whole and intact from the oven, and then had it shredded limb from limb by your sweaty chef, who will then leave the severed head on your plate. Forget carrots shaped like roses, that’s how you really decorate a plate in China…

And that was in a tasteful, respectable restaurant, full of businessmen and well-to-do families, with smart décor and an overall pleasant atmosphere. And then we remembered that we were in China, where such a thing does not exist, so out came the unicycling chef, who entertained us by grating some ginger on his head, and spinning some plates on some long sticks. Pointless but fascinating.

The Great Wall

Chairman Mao once said “he who has not climbed the wall is not a great man.” I imagine most tourists who come here are keen to prove their manliness to late dictator, and we were no different. One of our students kindly took us to a section of the wall that is still within the Tianjin region (most of it is way further north), but in reality that still meant a cramped 3-hour bus ride from the city. But the journey was worth it, as it was much less crowded than the sections that are closer to Beijing, and after a bit of hiking we practically had the place to ourselves. I think these days you only ever visit ‘sections’ of the wall, and, like most historical sites in this country, it’s very hard to find anywhere that hasn’t been heavily restored. Shame, and in parts here the wall looked a bit Chessington World of Adventures, but it’s interesting to see how it would have looked in days of old, and those parts that aren’t restored are virtually un-walkable as they are in such a crumbling state of disrepair. Shoddy Chinese workmanship again…

On the wall, wearing high heels. Only in China.

The wall snakes off up both sides a valley, and you pretty much just buy a ticket at the foot of the hill and climb on. Apart from the Wall being an awe-inspiring sight at times, especially when you remember how long the thing goes on for, it was great just to get out into the countryside for a day. It really hit home then that living in a Chinese city can be relentlessly urban; there really is so little green to escape to. When we went it was hot, and the wall is steep, with cramp-inducingly high steps, so my legs felt like jelly for the rest of the day. Incredibly, as we sweated our way up and down, we noticed that they were setting up the marker posts for the Great Wall Marathon, which was to take place the following weekend. Only a few miles were actually on the wall, but still, in that heat, and on that incline, it looked like 26 miles of sheer agony. Man enough for you, Mao?

Wall Marathon: no thanks.

Big country, small doors.

The heat and humidity are starting to become a bit overwhelming now that summer is here in full force; sometimes you can walk out of a classroom drenched head to toe in sweat, the air-conditioning strangley ineffective…And we’ve also had the odd rainstorm, which paralyses the whole city for the rest of the day. I think the novelty of being in China is starting to wear off, and maybe the same can be said for the teaching. The frustrations and complications of daily life can wear you down, and the same can definitely be said for teaching kids. At the times I have had contact with 3 or 4 year-olds, they will often just freeze, look you straight in the eye, and then start bawling. For them westerners must look like aliens, and that is not a bad description of how you can feel at times here. My flatmate Jim, who I’ve spent a great deal of time here with, will (very sadly indeed) be moving on at the end of July. I’m seriously jealous of the travelling he is about to embark on, (Tibet and South-East Asia) and he will be greatly missed here. Maybe the inability of the Chinese to spell his name right just became too much… Safe travels, bud!

This was Jim's nameplate at a public speaking contest where he was asked to be a judge.

Life in China presents many challenges. Ironing shouldn't be one of them.

Jim, David and Tina gazing up the wall. It's really quite rare to go anywhere in China and see so few people.

Chinese Tesco!

 

Service with a Smile

Will Philipps: Big in China

I’m still alive! Work and a variety of other less chaotic distractions (like being stopped for photos with my admiring and vertically-challenged fans out here, see above) have kept the blog writing to a minimum recently, but I’m back on track now and there’s plenty to talk about. From July I might not be so willing though; we’ve got EF’s summer peak-season coming up. This is the time when public school summer holidays mean a whole load of extra hours Monday to Friday to be doing English classes with us. And of course, the kids are literally gagging to be cooped up in our classrooms doing extra English lessons mid-holiday, and when it’s 40ºC outside, who can blame them?

Some kids I teach. No prizes for identifying the problem child.

That means six-day weeks for the teachers till September, which is right through the hottest part of the year. So even though the rest of this entry is going to be about fun stuff that I’ve been doing when not teaching, don’t forget that I have been doing and will be doing the odd day’s work here and there!

So what’s the best way to enjoy your precious time off in China? Whipping out the old chopsticks, of course, disregarding any sort of table etiquette and sweating your way through a meal of banquet-esque proportions. Recent highlights have included the spit-roast lamb over hot coals right there on your table (seriously sweat inducing. In China it’s quite alright for men to whip off their shirts at the dinner table, and the hot coals and 30ºC heat meant they didn’t need encouraging: I have never seen so many moobs in one place. If you don’t have beads of sweat dripping from your nips then you’re not a real man.)

I don't know what Beef Doodie is, and I don't want to find out.

Other more tasteful fares include one of our favourite restaurants in town, The Mandarin Pavilion. This is in the old British Concession part of Tianjin, Wu Da Dao, (5 Big Streets – the names always sound less enchanting when translated), an area of European style villas nestled in amongst the skyscrapers and concrete. (Yes, even strange Chinese cities you’ve never heard of have eerie, old ex-colonial areas, and, like many I’ve seen, it just feels out of place and a bit soulless. A serious lack of TLC in the last century has meant that most ‘villas’ are in various states of disrepair, and it’s often hard to know what’s actually inside them. That said, like much of the rest of the city, licks of paint and sprucing-ups are happening all over the place, and now the weather’s improved, it’s a great place to go for a stroll, and there are plenty of fine eateries and cafés if you know where to go. Leafy, car-free streets are at a premium here, so really Wu Da Dao is somewhere to savour.)

So going back to The Mandarin Pavilion: It’s small, smart, non-descript, the menus have photos, (a must), and they don’t try and rip us off every visit. But the best part? Well even though I mentioned above that this is a classier establishment, the t-shirts that the waitresses were wearing on our last visit suggested the contrary. An exemplary model of superior front-of-house service and hospitality that the Chinese seem to specialise in:

ADDED CHINGLISH BONUS: the 'Merry Xmas 2010' adorning the walls mid-May. Oozing class.

Two beanpoles in Tiananmen Square

I mentioned that I’d been to Beijing a couple of times, and that’s really a great way to unwind after teaching for a week. Door to door it’s only a few hours, and it actually takes longer on the subway to get from Beijing South Station (a train station that makes Stansted look small), to the centre of Beijing, than it does to get from city to city on the high-speed train. Which is an awesomely smooth experience, but one that I’m told won’t last for ever: apparently embezzled funding meant that the tracks were built on the cheap with sub-standard materials and will start to wear out and slow the trains down in the next 10 years. Quite a scary thought as you zip along the tracks at 350km/h…

But we’ve had no accidents yet, and every trip to the capital has been great fun. Beijing certainly is more Westernised than good old Tianjin, and there are noticeably more foreign faces to blend in with, tourists and expats alike. It’s great to go and sightsee in a huge city without the added pressure of knowing that you only have a few days to try and cram everything in. If the queue for the Forbidden City is too long: sod it. We’ll just come back next month, and for now we can head off and explore some back alleys, parks and hidden gems, something Beijing has in abundance.

A rare quiet corner of the Forbidden City

Proof that Chinese is difficult. Read the last sentence, "The words 'Zhong He' mean..."

The geographical centre of Beijing is the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, and around that is a vast area of low-rise buildings, whose tight-knit and packed in positioning means that they form hundreds of hutong. These are small alleyways, too narrow for cars (which doesn’t always mean no traffic; there’s always the stubborn Chinese driver who’ll have a go getting his 4×4 down one) and they all have a very authentic feel to them. Outside of that, of course you have the high rise areas of Beijing, smart yet unremarkable, but it’s great to be sat on a leafy roof top café in the centre of town, sipping on a lǜ chá (green tea) or lěng píjiǔ (lagers, mate), away from the hustle and bustle that engulfs the rest of Beijing and the most part of Tianjin. I guess that was what it was like for the emperors of old when they still inhabited the Forbidden City, and I bet they had a damn good time doing it, as that is one seriously expansive imperial palace. Makes old Buckingham look like a garden shed, but as I mentioned in the last blog it’s now heaving with tourists (and that was before the summer high-season), and although it’s one of those places you have to tick off the list, it is certainly not the best thing about Beijing.

Summer Palace in Beijing, flanked by fellow travellers Carlin and Jim

Sleeping Policeman. This was on the subway, and he was out for the count. Genuine policeman? Hard to tell...

More later!

There’s Only One Tianjin TEDA…

China: a bit of the old and the new.

Sorry it’s taken so long to get another blog entry up; the teaching, the learning of this insanely difficult language, and still being stared at wherever you go is a time consuming combination of activities. I’ve also been distracted by weekend trips to Beijing, (big shout out to Edinburgh Chinese Language graduate Alex Taggart, now a Beijing resident who I look forward to exploring more of Beijing with), which, at 30 mins on the 330km/h train from Tianjin, (and £5 a ticket!), are a great way to spend a couple of days. But that’s not to say that Tianjin is not keeping me entertained; the great thing about China is you will just see stuff in the street on a daily basis that makes you wish you had your camera with you at all times. Awful English translations (see photo below), ridiculous fashion senses, whole families on single bicycles, worryingly frequent road accidents, couples posing for corny wedding photos, large groups of old women (I’m talking 70 plus) out doing street aerobics to Chinese trance music at 9pm: it’s never-ending.

Down by the river in central Tianjin

Enticingly named attractions abound in China.

Last week myself, flatmate Jim, and fellow teacher David went to watch Tianjin TEDA football team play Melbourne Victory in the Asian Champions League. Some experience. Needless to say not many Aussie fans had made it over to support their team on Chinese soil, but the one-sided atmosphere (just how the Chinese like it) was great nonetheless. The quality of football, sadly, was not; it was a bit more Rymans League than Champions League, but that does make you appreciate how talented the football players back home are. Yet apparently Tianjin TEDA are now one of China’s better teams, and despite being a predominantly Chinese squad, there is the odd ex-European player who’s come over to live a life of luxury abroad and play the odd game of football. The sporting equivalent of a year’s TEFL teaching then…

Getting on the pre-match beers.

I think the three of us agreed that the pre-match build up was actually more enjoyable than the game itself. In theory it’s no different to back home; consuming food and beers, but done Chinese style: a small village of street-food vendors plying you with delicious skewers of spiced meat and veg, cooked over hot coals right in front of you, bowls of noodle soup prepared on what looked like small steam engines, and beer so cheap that if it was that price back home I don’t think many fans would actually make it past half-time. Throw in the added bonus that, as 3 non-Chinese we were quite the novelty for the home support, and so got invited in to watch the game from the “hardcore” fans section. (About as hardcore as a Beano. That said, we couldn’t understand the chants and a lot of the flags had images of Che Guevara on…) Still, the game finished 1-1, and we will doubtless be heading back again soon.

The Tianjin Faithful; a sea of well-behaved white and purple.

So a bit about what I actually came here to do. English First Tianjin (which I’ve now discovered is pronounced Tienjin, so basically I’ve been saying it wrong for a good month) has five schools in the city, and I teach at the biggest, the Tianta branch. Before arriving I was fairly apprehensive as to my future place of employment for the next year, and, as most of the language schools I had been to in the past are in dingy old buildings with high ceilings and fluorescent lighting, I was ready for a dire Chinese equivalent. Luckily, however, the Chinese equivalent is quite different. English language schools (almost always franchises) are big business in China, and in order for EF Tianjin to be successful it needs to be at the top of its game, which thankfully it is. The school is well staffed, well run, clean, high tech (every classroom has £2,000 smart white-boards in), well resourced and all in all a pleasure to teach in. It’s located centrally, easy to reach, spans two floors of an office block, and the other teachers are certainly a weird and wonderful bunch from all English-speaking corners of the globe; they’re great fun and have helped us acclimatise to the expat-in-China lifestyle considerably.

Nice snapshot of my life in China.

The school can be divided into two sections; the younger learners, from ages 3 (yes, some kids start learning English before they learn how to wipe their own arses; you actually have to grade them on their motor skills!) to 15, and then the older learners; 16 upwards. The younger section has far more classes, and much more focus is directed there. I’ve actually had more contact with the teenagers and mature students, but I’ll be having my fair share of teaching young kids as well. Because we are a private language school, not a high school, our classes are taken in addition to whatever might be learnt at school. So most of out teaching is done in the evenings and on weekends. An average week consists of two full days of teaching for all teachers on Saturday and Sunday (truly draining), three week days of planning those classes and giving evening classes (much more relaxed) and then our “weekends”: two consecutive weekdays off. (Freedom!)

How does this timetable affect your classes? Well, do you think little 4-year-old Lily wants to be studying English till 6pm on a Sunday evening? Or how about getting a group of teenagers to enjoy a two-hour class conveniently placed slap bang in the middle of their week’s only high-school free day? Hmmm…It’s one thing to read about overworked Chinese kids when you’re back home, but another to actually meet them, witness their gruelling schedule first hand, and heart-breakingly have to give them even more homework. When I announce in the middle of a two-hour class that there is a fifteen-minute break, they all whip out their school textbooks so they can get cracking with their homework for Monday morning. Extra classes of anything; sport, music, English, (Chinglish? I have a theory that the Chinese deliberately diffuse it around the country to amuse, entertain and then lull tourists under a false sense of naivety) are the norm, so naturally free time is a rare commodity for the average Chinese kid. (Of course these are the average middle-class kids, I’m sure other “average” Chinese kids have a very different sort of gruelling week…)

But of course it’s not all doom and gloom. Because we don’t want to make the kids feel like they are at school, the emphasis here is on communication, games, minimising bookwork and all in all creating a fun learning environment. Sound corny? I suppose it is, but it’s actually great fun and incredibly rewarding to see the younger kids sad to actually be leaving the classroom, high-fiving their teacher on the way out, and bursting with laughter when you do anything stupid. Which is highly encouraged. (They will also occasionally and inadvertently reward your clowning with a highly amusing interpretation of our language. Today little Zoe got me badly with her drawing of a bottle of Coke; the famous red label simply read ‘cock’.) I guess interacting with a ​laowai (foreigner) for them is an incredibly unusual and exciting experience, and, certainly for now, the same can be said for how I feel interacting with them. Before I came out here I pictured the Chinese students as one entity; hard working, timid and needing a lot of effort to engage in any kind of conversation. Of course the reality is quite different. You have to meet each and every one, from the devious little miscreant, to the incredibly self confident ten year old who can speak astonishingly good English. Then there’s the super rich businessman having to discuss his favourite film with the seemingly super-shy giggling girl, who spends most of the lesson with her face behind a pad of paper, but who actually turns out to be quite open in talking about herself, (once she’s got over the mind-boggling fact that I really do come from the UK and I really am this tall.)

Some of the English on show leaves a lot to be desired and, (I know it’s cruel as my Chinese is pitiful), here are some amusing emails I was sent by one of my students, Sean, aged 18. He sees me as some kind of messiah figure, sent to rescue him from the despicable and shameful ignominy of speaking crap English. He texts and emails me on a daily basis. Here is one example (in full):

“HI.Will. how is going this week? would you want to find a chinese girl friend? if you want ,I can introduce a chinese girl.”

Good of him, I guess. Or how about this example where he irons out the finer details of buffet etiquette in China, after clearly seeing me struggle in the local one:

“Hi Will Sean there! I’m very happy see you in the dinner.
So if you have any question for chinese or you china life. You can ask me. I can help you.
And do you usually eat food on there?
There food have the more and little, if you eat some meat food you can buy the little. The little is moderate.
Do you know what am I talking?

Er… no, not really, Sean.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed all the students have English names, which makes life a lot easier for us, as trying to remember a class full of Chinese names would have been a struggle. And mispronunciation would have led to extreme embarrassment for both parties, and the dreaded ‘losing face’: a strange part of day-to-day Chinese culture; essentially being embarrassed in public, but much worse (why? I don’t really know), that leads to widespread timidity. English names here range from the predictable and sensible to the unusual and downright absurd. So I’ve had the pleasure of teaching Dick, Apple, Rocky, Coco, Hunter, Bobo, Winner, Robort, Aslan, Superman, and a charming young girl called Kill. No joke. They either get given an English name at school or choose it themselves. (I think you can guess which category the above examples fall under.) Every so often you will get to name a student and so when one girl offered me the extremely prestigious right to name her I immediately suggested Elizabeth, Caroline or Olivia. She took some time to consider and came back next week as Brigitte. Her loss. So  if you send me a nice chatty email with all your news from back home (and I have had many so thanks for those) I may name a student after you (but I can’t promise they’ll keep the name!) Who knows where little “(insert your name here) Lu Xiang” will end up in 30 years time?

Some more snaps below:

In China you're never too far away from a happy couple.

Shopping with little people.

Forbidden City: not so forbidden these days.

Buddhist Supplies Stores. The Chinese "Boots".

Right in the centre of Beijing is Jingshan Park; cracking views and super chilled spot.

A Hard Life Hardly

Chinglish at its filthy best.

Tianjin has been my home for a month now, so I thought I’d better mark the occasion with another little blog update. The sun is shining now and spring is just around the corner! That said, apparently the Chinese springtime consists of about ten warm days, before summer barges in and it’s unbearably hot and humid till mid-October. Oh dear… Still not much sign of any greenery sprouting around the city, but I’m sure that it’s on it’s way… A bit of sunshine makes all the difference, and if you check out the photos I’ve posted from our days cycling throughout the city, you can get a feel for what the place is like. Apologies for any offensive ‘Chinglish’, but it’s simply too good not to post. You don’t have to go far for a cheap laugh; I simply walk out of my “buliding” and across the street is a shop specialising in “love and help”. Nice.

Stuffing my face with steamed buns, a local speciality.

I thought before coming out here that the food would be the hardest aspect of life to get used to; and after a month I can safely say it’s absolutely insane for a whole number of reasons, Although I mentioned something about McDonalds in the last post, in reality we’ve dived head first into the local cuisine. Eating out has unquestionably been the most entertaining part the trip so far. On our second night we had the misfortune of choosing a restaurant that had a menu with no pictures, so we just went for it and ordered two plates completely at random, disappointingly only ending up with a tame bowl noodles and some chicken wings. Given however that the restaurants here seem to specialise in whole fried duck’s head (beak still attached for easy grippage), we either considered ourselves lucky or reckoned that the waiters had just taken pity on us.

Of course rice and noodles are the staple diet, but I’ve eaten some really delicious food here and we are fortunate enough to live above a street that has a wealth of exciting eating options: Wandezhuan Daijen is a smaller street that I would describe as un-westernised (so not a KFC in sight), and has a real buzz in the evenings; street vendors (that are becoming ever more numerous now it’s getting warmer), small independent restaurants full of locals, Korean style barbecue restaurants, and a Muslim place, where they make the noodles fresh in front of you (the Chinese equivalent of an Italian chef chucking a pizza over his head, I guess).

The way people eat food here has taken some getting used to as well. I knew the Chinese weren’t big on table manners, so seeing people hunched over and shovelling food into their mouths was to be expected; having some fat Chinaman on the adjacent table to you lean over and gob on the floor, then light up a fag and start smoking right up in your face was not, and it slightly soured the rest of our otherwise delicious Korean barbecue, (complete with lurid pink mashed-potato). But it’s always the end of each meal time that is the most satisfying; getting the bill and pausing to reflect that you only need to depart with 60 kuai (£6) to enjoy a huge and delicious meal, washed down with a few beers. (Gutted to find out that the local beer ‘Tsingtao’, is a poncey 2.5% alcohol! Unlike their Japanese neighbours, the Chinese are not big drinkers…)

Old dudes fishing on some extremely thin ice right in the city centre

And then a bit further down, some old boys going for a dip. Mental!

I can now start to see the attraction of coming to live in China if you’re from ‘the West’. You can live a very comfortable lifestyle, on not very much money at all. At our local bare-bones place you never need pay more than 12 kuai (£1.20) for a decent plate of food, and we can buy all our weeks veg for about the same price. Of course, there are ‘Western’ supermarkets that sell all the usual imported foods, but, naturally, they are quite expensive, especially the wine. (The local wine, the classily named ‘Dynasty’, is quite nauseating, and is said to induce serious headaches. We’ll stick with the beer.)

Flatmate Jim navigating us through the old quarter.

A single to central London on the tube will get you about 4 taxi journeys here; it only costs 10 kuai (£1) to get the 10-minute cab ride to school. We cycle there most days however, and considering that the cost of a space in the guarded garage downstairs is a lofty 25 kuai (£2.50) for 4 months, we are saving quite a bit. The bikes themselves are complete crap that we bought from the supermarket, (roughly £25 a pop), but every street corner here seems to have a bike repairman, and seeing as my bike is probably not designed for a 13-stone, 6’ 4” male, doubtless I will be making a few visits soon. They’re still the best looking bikes in town though; you know when there is another cyclist behind you because you can hear their rusty piece of crap a mile off. (We’ve begun to treat every piece of Chinese workmanship with a certain degree of mistrust; everything here is just shoddily made! On one occasion a plumber showed up at our flat to fix the leaking tap that connects to our washing machine. The landlady was adamant that it be fixed it with the existing tap, which clearly didn’t fit properly, because she was damned if she was going to have to spend money on buying a new tap for one of her properties. 30 minutes of questionable, bin bag-aided DIY later (and one soaking floor and a lot of shouting in Chinese), she admitted defeat and the new tap was installed.)

The rest of the apartment certainly has it faults; (did I mention that the bathroom window is about as effective as a mosquito net for keeping out the cold?) but it’s starting to feel like home, and so is the city. I’ve got a great flatmate, the other teachers are certainly a weird and wonderful bunch from all English-speaking corners of the globe, the students in the school are hilarious (more on that later), and I’m actually starting to speak some Chinese, (mostly asking “How much is it?”, having no idea what the response is, so just handing over a tenner and hoping that covers it.) So all good really!

Much love, and thanks for the emails that came my way, always nice to read news from home.

Ni hao!

Thanks for checking out my blog about my time in China teaching English! I think all in all this is an easier way of communicating than round robin emails, and hopefully I can add some photos. I’ve been here now for about two weeks, and I’ve got to say that so far, so good. We’ve just been hooked up with internet in our flat (that actually works) so now I can take a break from my 4 hour stints of Mandarin learning to enlighten you on how interesting and bizarre this country is.

For now I’ll just give you my first impressions of Tianjin, the city where I’m based and leave the school and teaching till later. As a city of 10-12 million people, it’s pretty damn huge, and driving in from the airport I thought I might be spending the next year in a dusty ghost-town of huge tower blocks that look like they have just been plonked down in the middle of the countryside. But that is only the outskirts, and luckily we are living in the city centre, which, sadly in some respects, I guess we will rarely leave.

First thing we did (‘we’ is me and my flat mate, Jim, also from UK, same age, same reasons for coming out to China etc.) is arrive at our accommodation, which is a roomy flat on the 27^th floor of a modern block in the centre of town. Incredible views when the smog lifts; but unfortunately the smog seems pretty persistent and gives the city an overcast feeling. In fact our first night was the last night of Spring Festival, so the whole city below us was alive with fireworks and bangers, (which started up again at 6 in the morning), but it meant a not so satisfying jet-lagged sleep.

So if the outskirts were not so promising, the high-rise filled city proper is a different story. Wide three-lane avenues criss-crossed with dusty alleyways, all filled with droves of cyclists (of which I am now one) that are generally quite well looked after. The traffic is absolutely insane; crossing the road is like a three-way game of chicken between motorist, cyclist and pedestrian, so we generally try to get right into the middle of a crowd of people crossing. That way if any motorist decides he doesn’t fancy slowing down, there will be a small Chinese family acting as a buffer between us and oncoming car.

At the bottom of the skyscrapers you’ll find one huge shopping mall after another. There are so many KFC’s, McDonald’s, Nike and Adidas shops, it’s quite scary. Chinese consumption is high among the growing middle classes, and I think it’s going to be impossible for me to eat healthily here. McDonalds really is seen as a trendy place to eat for families, and holds quite a status. There is even such a lack of good coffee around the school that it is under the golden arches that I get my fix. Remind me why I didn’t go back to Italy? In fact, in our first and last visit to one particular “coffee chop” below our building, I foolishly ordered a cappuccino. Fifteen minutes later a cup came back with a thick layer of whipped cream and pink and yellow hundreds and thousands sprinkled over it. It had taken so long to prepare that the coffee underneath had actually gone cold. Mamma mia.

The supermarkets are another place to go for a guaranteed culture shock. One evening as we were queuing at the checkout, I looked over a few rows across to see a man putting his shopping on the conveyor belt, which included a large fish in a plastic bag that was STILL ALIVE. No attempt to keep it in water, it was just thrashing about on the belt gasping for life. The girl at the checkout had to call for her supervisor to come and thwack the life out of it. That said, the supermarkets here are pretty well stocked, and most products have their names in English so we know roughly what we’re getting.

One on of our days off we cycled to a big tourist attraction ‘Ancient Cultural Street’, (All the English names here are gloriously literal; if it’s some bread or a cake you’re after head to popular chain ‘Breadcake’, yet we left ‘Peachy Coffee and Board Game’ disappointed at the unfruitiness of the hot drinks but intrigued by a Cold War themed board game.) ‘Ancient Cultural Street’, despite its name, is fairly tacky in places, but very interesting nonetheless, and perhaps the closest we’ll get to traditional China in our city. We seemed to be the only western tourists (I find myself using the word ‘western’ a lot here), and coupled with the fact I’ve yet to see someone in this city as tall as me, you’re never too far from a staring old Chinese bloke or a group of giggling girls trying not very hard to be subtle.

But after two weeks now I’m feeling settled, and really enjoying the life here. The last few days have been nipple-hardeningly cold (massive snow storm on the weekend), but that seems to have dispersed the smog, so I’ve just been enjoying cycling round the city in the sun (got to burn off those big macs somehow), getting to know my fellow teachers and just taking it all in.  The teaching is starting up in earnest now, so undoubtedly that will be keeping me busy during the week, but I’m sure I’ll have some time to keep this blog going.

Love hearing any news from back home, so email or post a comment below.

Will.

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