End of the year book round-up

Every year, about mid-December, I get really excited about writing about the books I read in the past year. Since 2005 I've kept a list of everything I read; since 2007 it's been primarily online. In 2009 I might go back to the word document/excel file method, because one thing I miss about using goodreads is that I no longer have a tally of page numbers. I read fewer books this year than last year, but a lot of the books I read were fairly long. And I've been reading an epic biography of Mao Zedong for the last month (it's over 900 pages, but if you skip the interviews, index, and footnotes it's a mere 770!)

Overall trends of the year: short stories and nonfiction. Short story collections are good for the busy reader, and I'm happy to start reading more nonfiction because I used to be a straight-up novel girl.
Web reading trend of the year: lots of Google reader, especially science articles, and cutting celebrity snark blogs out of my life. (I've still got things like Gawker, Defamer, GFY, and the IMDB news feed, but I think I'm a much happier person for not reading I Don't Like You In That Way or Tyler Durden to find out who looks fat in their bikini.)
Recent bandwagon trend: the New Yorker fiction podcast. I can't really read on noisy crowded buses here, but with this podcast, it's just like I can.
Life change/awesome website of the year: Bookmooch! I had to get rid of a lot of my library when moving across the world, so I sold some books online, gave more to the library, conveniently forgot a few at friends' houses, and shared a lot through Bookmooch. I highly recommend it, especially for those of you still in the U.S. with its awesome cheap media mail. Giving a book to someone who you know wants it is a great feeling.

1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
2. Straight Man by Richard Russo
3. Tomcat in Love by Tim O'Brien
I started off the year with a mini-trend of college satirical novels. Lucky Jim is the best and one of the very first. I read Francine Prose's Blue Angel towards the end of 2007, which kick-started the college novel trend and led me to Lucky Jim, which I'd never heard of before. If you like this type of novel, you need to check out the original.
4. The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley by Malcom X
5. Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore
6. My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro edited by Jeffrey Eugenides
I read a lot of books about birds this year.. but surprisingly, not these two.
7. Beautiful Children by Charles Bock
8. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
9. At Home in the World: A Memoir by Joyce Maynard
Felt sorry for her when I finished reading it, but still wanted to go read Salinger instead.
10. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
11. Up in the Air by Walter Kirn
12. Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
13. Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park by Marie Winn
I didn't think this book was written particularly well, but hey, hawks! In the city!
14. Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris
15. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger
Loved Raise High the Roof Beam, couldn't make it through Seymour.
16. The Life of the Skies by Jonathan Rosen
Great book about what it means to be a birdwatcher/observe the natural world, and why it's so important, but I'm afraid that if I try to describe it it will sound really cheesy.
17. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
18. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
I am so glad I came back to this book and actually read it!
19. Things I Learned About My Dad: Humorous and Heartfelt Essays, edited by Heather Armstrong
A really uneven book of essays. I'm sorry to end the year with this one. Maybe I can read five hundred pages about Mao before tomorrow night.

This year I got away from my goal of reading National Book Award winners, Pulitzers, and the Modern Library's 100 best 20th century novels - the only one I picked up was Kavalier and Clay.

I can't really pick a favorite book of the year - as I look at this list, my choices seem to be all over the place. Best novel? Best nonfiction? Best essay or short story? Most important? Most thought-provoking? "Kavalier and Clay" is great, but you know that. Everyone should read Malcolm X's Autobiography. The collection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides has an awesome title referencing Catullus, a lot of excellent stories, and a human heart on the cover, so that's worth your time. "Beautiful Children" got a ton of hype and subsequent backlash, but in my opinion it's a very good novel about a child's disappearance that follows multiple characters through Las Vegas and manages to keep them all from becoming caricatures (usually).

All that said, I keep coming back to "Life of the Skies." Part history of birdwatchers and birdwatching, part quest for the ivory-billed woodpecker, part memoir; full of literary references and early Audubon illustrations; this book explores what it means to be a birdwatcher in the early 21st century - and I mean birdwatcher as in "hey, look, there's a robin in my yard" not snobby analyses of breeding plumage of tiny birds in treetops that all look the same from the ground. It's a big read, but a good one. Enjoy it while reading something else - may I suggest a collection of short stories or humorous essays?

Read between the lines

The scene: my apartment
The time: last night, 1:30 am.
The quote: "Okay guys, as I see it we have two choices. We go on a beer run, or we go out for barbeque."

Let's parse all the ways that sentence is awesome.
1. You can buy beer at 1:30 in the morning! In fact, half a block from my house is a 24-hour convenience store, and as far as I can tell, there is not a single liquor control law in China.
2. You can get barbeque at 1:30 in the morning! Delicious, life-giving barbeque.
3. Nobody works on weekday mornings! It is totally kosher to stay up late drinking after class and then wake up late the next day. In fact, as soon as Dan gets out of the shower, we're headed down to Macao for the day.
4. Advanced analysis: drinking in my apartment is way cheaper (and sometimes more fun) than hitting a smoke-filled western bar where you end up desperately trying to figure out what Australians are saying.

We ended up with barbeque, because it's hard to resist the lure of hot dogs, tofu strips, beef, and chicken. We also got my favorite thing - I only know the name in Chinese (jiu cai) but it's sorta like chives or green onions, lightly spiced and shoved on a skewer - as well as mushrooms and cauliflower (literally "flower vegetable" in Chinese). All things considered, this is a pretty great country.

Not exactly how the Pilgrims imagined it, but...

How do you celebrate the most American of holidays when you're in China? For the last week I've been talking to my classes about it, but it's hard. We gave Thanksgiving cards (?) to the kids' classes, so I ended up with a small stack of drawings and well-wishes I can't read. (My TA claims the kids didn't do very well writing in Chinese either.) Then the adult class wanted to know all about this holiday, but as soon as I start to explain it, I realized how American all the food is. "So there's cranberries.. um, hmm, little red berries that are tart? And pumpkin... um, but a lot bigger than the pumpkins here. And turkey..." at which point one of my students grabbed her electronic translator and told everyone it was "big chicken."

Thankfully, the Holiday Inn had a Thanksgiving buffet for all our expat food cravings. The cranberry-flavored gravy was a little weird, and the sweet potatoes were definitely the Chinese type, but otherwise it was a delicious feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, clam chowder, duck, seafood, lamb stew, and everything else you could imagine. They even had a row of steaks and pork chops they would grill to order and bring to your table, but we all had our eyes on the turkey. We drank some red wine, saved room for a mini-pumpkin tart, and waddled back to our bus stop. The only thing missing was seeing the Lions lose.

I hope you all had safe, happy, and delicious Thanksgivings as well.

My routine

I've been in China for two and a half months and I'm settling into a routine. Saturday and Sunday are the marathon teaching days, but even these are getting better. Planning takes a lot less time than it used to; discipline and managing a kindergarten classroom are going much better; and last Sunday my teacher's assistant said she really likes the games and activities I've been coming up with. Most of my students seem to like me. A lot of them seem to spend a lot of time at the school - they're around hours before or after our class. These kids will come up to me during lunch or break and try to talk to me in English or Chinese. The little ones just scream "Hello!"; the older kindergardeners say "I am Candy, I am a girl" or occasionally "I am a pencil case" (that girl needs to study more); and one of my Children's class students has a mother who speaks good English and coaches him to come up and ask me "Can you read Chinese?" He then runs off to get a follow up question from his mother. During the two-hour break, I usually order lunch with the other teachers and staff, and we have it delivered to the school. But now that the weather's getting cooler I'm trying to go outside and take a walk, just get out of the building.

Besides the weekend slog, I teach adult classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings from 7:30 - 9:30. My first term of adult classes ended last week and I started the new term last night. I switched branches of the school but I'm teaching the exact same course again, which is nice. My old adult class was at the same place as my weekend classes, about a ten minute bus ride away. Convenient, but a bit boring to go to the same place 5 days a week. My new branch is also about ten minutes away, but quicker to get to because more busses run in that direction. It's a more commercial part of the city, with a lot of restaurants and barbeques open late, which is really cool. I think it will be a fun place to teach for the next two months.

So how do I fill my days? We get up in the morning and usually eat breakfast sometime between 10 and noon. This might be standard Western fare like eggs at our house, or steamed buns from a stand on the street. There's also a bakery we go to sometimes, but it's nothing like a Western bakery. Think of a danish with hot dogs or dried squid on top, and not a blueberry muffin in sight.

We usually go out for lunch because there are so many cheap options. There's a place close to our apartment that we call the pick and point, because you get a plate of rice and just point at three dishes you'd like to eat. It's usually pretty tasty, but every few trips you accidentally end up with a scoop of bitter melon or duck fat, so you have to exercise caution. Next to the pick and point is the muslim noodles place: mostly bowls of soup with fresh-made pasta, a little beef or lamb, and some vegetables.

Timing dinner on teaching nights is a little tricky, since we leave for class around 6:50 and I hate being full when I teach. We cook dinner frequently (we have a lot of spices now and can fake most Western food that doesn't require an oven) or go out with friends. There's a northeastern Chinese restaurant nearby that's open really late, so about once a week we'll end up eating dumplings there after English class.

Twice a week we have Chinese class in the morning and lately we've been spending a lot of time studying so we can get better. We're currently at a level where we can understand when people say "I don't think they speak very much Chinese, haha" so it's time to push it to the next level. We try to go out and do something at least once a week, whether it's shopping in a different part of the city, hiking on the nearby island, or even going to Macao. This past Monday we went to a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of the city. We go shopping frequently, usually for groceries or stuff for our apartment. Every shopping trip is an adventure, whether we're speaking Chinese to a saleswoman or trying to determine which bag of white powder might be flour. The easiest place to go is Jusco, the Japanese supermarket, but it's also expensive and full of women who follow you around trying to help you. We buy a lot of vegetables and some fruit from the stalls set up near our apartment; we've basically chosen two vendors we always go to and now they're charging us a little less. And we watch a lot of DVDs, because you can get almost anything here if you look hard enough. We finished season 1 of "Mad Men" last week and are currently watching "30 Rock" and "Generation Kill."

I hope this gives you a better idea of my life in China. Leave any questions in the comments!

Taxicab confessions

So obviously I don't speak much Chinese. (Note: I am allowed to call it Chinese instead of Mandarin, because that's what some of my Chinese friends call the main dialect. And if you refer to it as Mandarin, most people look utterly puzzled until you explain it's "Putonghua" which I think means "common speech.") Westerners are advised, when taking taxis, to bring business cards with the Chinese address written down, or to call up a Chinese friend to give directions. I've only called a Chinese friend twice, and once was the other night en route to a karaoke bar near my apartment. Since it was so close, I just stepped in the taxi and handed the driver the phone. My clear lack of Chinese skills didn't faze the driver in the slightest, and he spent the rest of the ride trying to engage me in conversation.

I was able to hold my own, surprisingly, and whenever I didn't know what he was saying I just responded with a non sequitur about myself. It started off well with "Where are you from?" but when he asked a question I couldn't answer, I jumped right into "I am a teacher!" After a few follow-up questions I struggled to answer, I told him "I am not able to speak Chinese" but he was not convinced. When he asked me a question involving "where?" I told him what region of the city I teach in. He also asked me whether I had a boyfriend (a word I had learned in class the previous day) and some question that used the word "two," so I told him I only wanted one boyfriend. For every other question I didn't know, I alternated between telling him I like China and I like Zhuhai. Damn, I'm like practically fluent.

If you're wondering, this karaoke place did not have "Hotel California" (shocking!) but they did have Arrested Development scandalous favorite "Afternoon Delight."

1.3 billion people can't be wrong

When we first got here and got one of those culture shock lessons, a veteran teacher told me it's better to be a golden retriever than a doberman. Both are big dogs who will, inevitably, run into you and knock something over and break it. But the golden retriever does it while wagging his tail, so everyone rolls their eyes, pats him on the head and gives him a dog treat.

I have not taken this advice to heart. I am working my ass off in Chinese class, and I usually carry around a notebook to write down new words I learn, or study while I'm on the bus. But I usually avoid speaking Chinese in public, because I am terrible at it and I hate being embarrassed or misunderstood. I've convinced a woman at a vegetable stall that I speak better Chinese than Dan because I smile a lot when she talks to me. Plus, I keep a running tally of what the produce costs, and when she tells us the price I watch her hands (they do hand signals for numbers here) so I always figure out her price on the first time. Other than that, and a few restaurants we go to a lot where I'm willing to ask for spoons or rice, I only speak Chinese when I drink beer. I hope that someday I will become fluent in drunken Chinese (I mean, I speak French better when I'm drinking) but if I actually want to improve I should try speaking when I'm sober.

I'm not sure what kind of dog that makes me, but it's definitely not the lovable idiot that is the golden retriever. My friend Luke is much better at communicating through gestures and little bits of Chinese: in the past he's ordered us noodles by pointing at wires and making slurping motions. After this happened I went home and looked up the word for noodles.
-----
I wrote the first half of this post in a self-loathing moment last week, and then something amazing happened. My Chinese got a lot better! I still don't know that many words, but the sounds have begun making sense to me. In our last Chinese class, our teacher said that Dan and I have made real progress and our tones were the best she'd heard from us so far. I finally learned the name of the bus stop for the school branch I teach at (and it only took like 30 bus trips there!) I've even started picking up a few words on the bus or in the classroom - yesterday I learned that the words for "where" and "there" are practically the same, and that my afternoon TA translates a lot of what I say into Chinese.

I'm also trying much harder to be the golden retriever, to at least attempt to speak Chinese and get better. Because honestly, most people seem happy just to meet me. When we're taking the elevator up to our apartment, people often talk to me and Dan. The conversation is pretty much "Wow, you guys are tall! I am short. You are very beautiful. Where are you from?" but at least it's all in Chinese.

The written language, however, is a totally different story. I read the book "River Town" by Peter Hessler and he described going for runs near his school and reading the same sign every day: "People Something Something Work Something Something Something China." I always think of this because this is how I read every poster. I know maybe twenty characters, including people, China, entrance, exit, and no. There are a few more I know in context: I know the symbols for the bus stops I use regularly, and I can recognize the symbols for month and day when they're, um, written in dates. Okay, so that's not that impressive. But every little bit helps when you're in a country that has at least six different words for bathroom. I usually say "WC."

Avifauna

(Or Birds! Sometimes I have to use big words in my blog posts because I spend so much time speaking slow, simple English.)

Last week was a week of adventures. On Monday Dan and I went on a quest to find the Carrefour, a French supermarket chain. Our directions were terrible and it involved a lot of walking, plus back-tracking on the bus. At one point we found ourselves walking past a few old apartment buildings surrounded by the remnants of lots of old apartment buildings and people breaking down the bricks by chopping them with a machete. Shortly afterward, we saw this:



That's when we realized this was not the way to the Carrefour. We eventually found it at the opposite end of the road and bought 6 cans of tomatoes.

On Tuesday, we went to a nearby park to take a long walk somewhere green and maybe see some birds. I was really excited when we first got there because the list of park rules included "Don't threaten the birds" and the map showed an area labeled "Birds' Paradise". But when we hiked up to Birds' Paradise, it was nothing but peacocks tied to a bench. Dan got one good photo of me before a park employee attempted to make me pay a fee for sitting on the bench (you can see it here, try not to be too disappointed if you see the same photos on my blog! I have little to no photography skills.) There was more to the birds' paradise too but you had to pay to get in, and I've heard that Chinese zoos can be really cheesy (at best) or depressing and cramped. Instead we hiked up the mountain and saw beautiful views of the city. We even drank a beer while looking at our apartment building and supermarket!



As we left the park and headed back for the bus stop, we decided to stop in at the park across the street. And finally I got to see some birds:



I also saw a lot of girls in high heels almost fall into the pond while posing for pictures in front of these statues. But even more entertaining was spotting some REAL birds: a common kingfisher

Photo by Dan

We watched this bird for quite some time and even saw it dive in the water to catch a fish!
We also saw one of my favorite Chinese birds, the black-backed wagtail.

Photo copyright Barry Heinrich from www.birdskorea.org

These birds are very cute, swooping up and down in low flights and calling. They also run around on the grass eating insects and, you guessed it, wagging their tails.
We also spotted a new bird I had never seen before, a white-vented bulbul making a lot of noise at the top of a tree.

Photo copyright Nials Moore from www.birdskorea.org

My other favorite common local bird is the magpie robin. I can't get the pictures to load right, and anyway we didn't see it at the park that day, but you can check out some cool shots on
Wikipedia. I often see these birds in the grass or garden area near our apartment building. Since I am a novice birdwatcher I enjoy any bird which forages out in the open and has obvious identification points like white tail bars that you can see while it's flying.

Anticipation

Right this minute I am waiting for coffee to percolate in my new French press. There are no words to convey how excited I am. Yesterday I drank an iced coffee drink right after I woke up and I was amazed how fast the transformation from groggy, grumpy Horn into functional human being took place. Seriously, apart from yesterday's coffee drink I have had coffee TWICE in the last two months (and one was a disgusting iced coffee with ice cream that I got at KFC). You all know me, so you know how shocking that is. Even though I don't know how to use a French press, and I've already spilled hot water with coffee grounds all over the kitchen table, everything is going to be amazing in a few more minutes.

In other news, last night I found my karaoke song: "Steal My Sunshine" by Len (remember?) Somewhere my sister is nodding her head, because of course I'd be good at that song, I sang it in the car on the way to high school every day for three months. I am also pretty good at "Wannabe" and "Hit Me Baby One More Time" but not so good at "2 Become One" and "I'm a Slave 4 U". Twice I looked for Patsy Cline's "Crazy", which is THE "I'm slightly too drunk to be singing karaoke in front of other people" standard, but no dice.

Ok, forget the rest of this post. It's coffee time!!!!!

I taught them how to spell "mafia"

If Dan's the J.D. Salinger of blogging, then maybe I'm the Donna Tartt? Only hopefully my sophomore effort won't be as terrible as "The Little Friend."

Being in China is weird, and time seems to fly by. Every week I'm surprised when it's Friday afternoon and I start to hate everything again. The two day teaching marathon is exhausting, and I don't like having to run so much of my class through a teacher's assistant. Thank god they're around to help, but how can you properly manage a classroom when you have to tell someone else to do it for you? I love being in China, but in all honesty I preferred my job teaching Latin in the U.S. I can't stress enough how great it is to teach someone who speaks the same language as you.

This weekend I decided to add to my class load by picking up a shift at the English Corner. I chose movies as a topic and I just spent the last hour and a half discussing everything from "Gone With the Wind" to "Brokeback Mountain" to the mafia controlling the Hong Kong film industry. About ten women ranging from middle schoolers to "my age is a secret" showed up to this free talk. Though I was hesitant about the extra responsibility, I really enjoyed just shooting the breeze and discussing movies with the best (non-American) English speakers I've met since I've been here. (Note: it so happens that I don't know most of the British teachers very well, and the Aussies can't speak English at all! A thong is underwear, for serious!) I even told the class how much I enjoyed speaking English with them. It is so boring for me to spend my Saturday and Sunday saying nothing but "An eraser... I have an eraser... do you have an eraser? A pencil case... I have a pencil case... Johnny, stop hitting Rose or you're going in time out!! I mean it!" and then turning to the TA and asking her to please tell Johnny to stop hitting Rose or he's going in time out.

Back in movie-related news, I found this completely insane documentary in one of the DVD shops downstairs from my house. I have been interested in this movie for a long time but once I moved and gave up my Netflix I figured it was lost and gone forever (or until Movie Madness). I don't know what the hell it was doing in Zhuhai except, of course, waiting for me to buy it.

Long days and weird food

One of my friends here said that the last time he talked to his mom, she admonished him not to waste his time here by drinking all the time. If my mom has similar concerns, my adventures yesterday should put them to rest.

We have some minor problems with our apartment, so in the morning Dan stayed to wait for the repair guys while I went out grocery shopping. I also wanted to buy some hair conditioner. Now, the supermarket we go to is massively overstaffed. There's a department store above the supermarket section, and if you so much as glance at a towel, a woman will race over to unfold it for you, then follow you around for the next five minutes suggesting additional towels and telling you in Mandarin how great they are. Downstairs, they're usually more relaxed. But since I can't read the Chinese characters for "conditioner" it took me too long to find what I wanted, and a clerk swooped in. I pointed at one of the few (expensive) bottles that actually said conditioner in English and used my favorite Chinese word, "this." Then I just stood back and watched her show me multiple bottles, all over 30 RMB, and let her point at various characters on the back that I couldn't even begin to read.

Eventually I grabbed the cheapest bottle with English writing on it and left the aisle. But she chased me down with a bottle of shampoo! I started breaking out all the Chinese I know, which is nothing but: "I have this." (pointing at shampoo)
"I don't have this." (pointing at conditioner)
and wishing I remembered the word for need. Then I started to mime washing my hair, at which point she got really confused and dragged me to the sushi counter to find someone who spoke better English. Luckily, a random customer who spoke English intervened and helped me pick an appropriate conditioner at 1/3 the price. It's even made by an American company, so I'm sure to like it.

In the afternoon, Dan and I had a cooking lesson with a friend who owns a baking school. Her chef friend taught us how to make kung pao chicken, deep fried peppers, and a pickled cucumber salad. In the US I think kung pao chicken is disgusting but this was amazing. It was the platonic ideal form of kung pao chicken. We're swapping Chinese cooking lessons for American cooking lessons, so we taught them how to make hamburgers. That's what they wanted to learn, and they took a lot of photographs.

To celebrate, we went to a dive bar! This is exciting because most bars in China are either outdoors (upside: watching the hookers run from the cops) or nightclubs (upside: drinking a bottle of whiskey mixed with green tea while playing rock-paper-scissors). We found a bar with a Coors Light sign in the window and played liar's dice with our friend Luke. We made friends with/were told various stuff we didn't understand by the Chinese guys sitting behind us, and when we tried to ask them what the name of the bar food they ordered was, we ended up eating a plate of snails. They're spicy but a real pain to eat, because they're tiny (about the size of periwinkles).

The night ended at Luke's friend Dongdong's house, where she served us the very famous bird's nest soup. I felt a little guilty about eating bird's nests, but I figured I might never get the chance again. It was actually delicious - very sweet, and the nest itself was like really thin noodles. Plus, it was awesome when someone leaned over to me with a pocket translator to tell me what I was eating, and the translation came up "edible bird's nest." Definitely the strangest thing I've eaten so far.

Mail call

Today I was at my school's Chinese class, and someone came in and handed me an envelope that had arrived for me. I was delighted, and intrigued! There was no return address, but the stamps were from Hong Kong. (And had birds on them.) Inside were a few random maps of other parts of China, an informative pamphlet about Yangshuo's only REAL water cave, and (used?) tickets to a palace in our city. There was no note. I don't know who sent this to me, and I don't know why.

For the record, if you want to send me care packages, I would be excited to receive:
-American deodorant
-ladies' razor blades
-sunscreen without whitening pigment
-my favorite face wash
-a freaking Mandarin phrasebook and dictionary (why I didn't bring these, I have no clue)
-an actual note telling me who sent it

What I did while the temperature fell in New England

Our city, Zhuhai, is nicknamed the city of 1000 islands. One of them is visible from our apartment window (see it here and we went to another a couple of weeks ago (Qi Ao island, which Dan wrote about here).

That still leaves 998 islands to explore! So when Dan and I realized we couldn't go to the Phillipines during our week long October break (there were more problems than just my inability to spell Philippines), we decided to find a nice island nearby. Everyone said Miawan Island, about a 4 hour boat ride away, is the prettiest island in Zhuhai. But since we're foreigners, we're apparently not supposed to go. Instead, last Monday morning, Dan, our friend Luke, and I headed out to Wanshan Island to spend three days and two nights soaking up sun, surf, and seafood.

Three Americans walking around with big backpacks on was probably pretty amazing to the people in our neighborhood, as most Chinese never go backpacking, camping, or hiking. Luke pointed out this might be some people's dinner conversations tonight: "Guess what I saw crazy foreigners doing today!" We made it to the port and onto the ferry with little trouble, though they did call us into a back room to check our passports. When we arrived at Wanshan 90 minutes later, we had our passports checked again. Our guide tried to take us up to our hotel but, being savvy travelers, we pointed at the police officer holding our passports and said "no" and then made passport gestures with our hands. So we waited a few more minutes, then walked up to the police station with our guide, the officer, and some friendly-looking stray dogs. Photocopies were made, everyone in the station took a good look at our passports, then we got them back and headed off to the hotel. After ascending three flights of stairs, passing more dogs, chickens, and a goat on the way, we found that both rooms had an air conditioner, a locking door, a box with a gas mask (just in case!) and an attached bathroom with sink, squat toilet, and shower head over the squat toilet. Decent! Then they took us out to lunch along with all the other people who were on our same trip.

The guy who owned the restaurant (and also waited tables, hired boats, and occasionally drove taxis around the island) came out holding a turtle. However, nothing we were served contained turtle, so it's probably just a promotional turtle. The food was served based on difficulty to eat - we started with soup, moved on to stir-fried vegetables, a brief stop at mussels and prawns, then straight on to fish of various sizes. There was also something called li niao sha which were like half-crayfish, half-lobster. They didn't have claws but they did have spikes on the sides, and before cracking them open with your bare hands you had to wiggle the spine like a lobster massage. For the rest of the trip, whenever anyone tried to recommend these to us, they made the massaging spine motion. At the end of lunch everyone at our table wandered off, so we asked one guy who spoke pretty good English where the beach was. There wasn't one on the island, but they would take us by boat to a smaller island where we could swim. We were ready to go, right? Ohh - that's where everyone else wandered off to. We ran up to the hotel and grabbed towels, sunscreen, and our cameras.

In fact, we made all the other travelers wait for us and then we went to a little shop and made them wait longer while we bought soda and water. Somehow we still got onto the first boat to the island. I'm not sure that was a good thing, as the boat ride out there was minorly terrifying. I held onto my bag with one hand and the boat with the other and hoped my sunglasses would stay on my face. Here is a picture of the tiny open-top boat that brought us out:



but also note the beautiful blue ocean and lovely mountains in the background! The beach was fairly clean and not at all crowded - there were never more than about 50 people there, and I think they were all connected to our trip. We spotted goats and deer up on the hills above the beach, and I watched birds flying around and wished I had remembered to grab my binoculars. But I had no complaints: while we floated in the South China Sea, New Englanders prepared for the arrival of a hurricane. Suckers!

Meanwhile, we made some foreign friends:



The guy from lunch who spoke pretty good English took this picture of us with his wife. And we really are foreign friends now - when he emailed Dan this picture, he addressed it to "my American friends" and signed it "your Chinese friends."

Remember how the travel agents told us we could eat anything we wanted from the ocean, because it was free? Well, an hour or so after we got on the beach a diver came up with bags full of mussels. They were larger and more barnacle-encrusted than most mussels I've had before, so a lot of our fellow travelers got rocks and chipped off the barnacles. Then, two of the guides built a fire and boiled them. We played the confused foreigner card and wandered over just before they were done. Our gamble worked out as many of the women on the trip just kept handing me mussels. I played along like I had never had these delicious mollusks before, learned their name (qing kou), and kept saying my new favorite Chinese word "hao chi" (tasty).



When the sun started to set, the boat took us back to Wanshan Island. We snapped this photo of the view outside our hotel room as the sun went down.



Stay tuned for part two, including puppies and squid ink! (not together, that would be terrible)

Bon appetit

I was reading this article from the Times yesterday, about how some chefs in New York are ordering whole cows and pigs and butchering them themselves. And my first thought was "so what?" Being in China, even for just a month, has really changed how I think about food. Yes, you can go the supermarket and get a container of ground beef, frozen pre-cooked shrimp, or even a bag of frozen chicken nuggets. But then you turn around in that very supermarket and you see a wall of fish tanks (including live turtles) and a half a cow hanging from a rack. Not behind a counter near a friendly, red-aproned butcher, but right on the floor, so close that you might have to step behind it to avoid a tiny child in a shopping cart car.

And this is the fancy expensive Japanese supermarket, which is great for the selection and for nervous foreigners who like their meat refrigerated. Most people don't get their groceries there. On the street behind our apartment is a series of stalls and markets. We have no problem shopping for vegetables or fruit down there, and there's a stand with amazing vegetable and pork steamed buns that I'm getting hungry just thinking about. But we also have the option of big cuts of raw meat sitting out in the 90 degree heat, or all the drying fish and shrimp you could possibly want. So far we have resisted those temptations.

Also on the same street, there are two restaurants we often go to for cheap lunches and dinners. There's the "pick and point" where you get rice, soup, and three random vegetables or meat that you point at (for about 1 American dollar) and its neighbor, Muslim noodles - delicious noodle dishes cooked and served by women in headscarves. In between them on the sidewalk is a crate of live chickens. Not only does this guarantee your meat is fresh, it provides dining entertainment when people come up to purchase one. China is not a land of Purdue chicken tenders. When you want to buy a chicken, you pick one that looks delicious and wait for a nice-looking young woman to kill and pluck it for you. If watching this while you eat makes you uncomfortable, just make sure you get to the table first so your chair faces the opposite direction.

Yaycation

I'm not going to post at all for the next few days because I'm going on vacation! China is 7 times more awesome than then US because instead of getting one day off for their nation's birthday, they get a whole week. This means I got two weekends free from little kids crying, sneezing on me, and not speaking English, and one week free from adults doing the same (ha, just kidding, they speak English in class). Dan and I just got our residence permits finalized so one thing we're hoping to do is go to Macao or Hong Kong, now that we can leave the country and get back in.

But before that, we're taking a three day trip to a beautiful tropical island! We leave in a couple of hours to take a 2 hour ferry to Wanshan Island. It's out in the ocean and you can go swimming from the beach (something you definitely can't do in the Pearl River Delta). According to the travel agent, we can also eat anything we can catch from the ocean, for free. I'll let you all know how that goes.

Not speaking Chinese sucks

So I've been planning to start my China blog (and shamelessly steal pictures from Dan's) but lately, I haven't been in that good of a mood. I thought maybe I would wait until I had something more to say than "Not speaking Chinese sucks" and "It's really hot here."

But wait! Not speaking Chinese really does suck! I only go to restaurants with pictures or English on the menu, or places where the food is all in hot trays in front of me and I point at what I want to eat. Sometimes when people get tired of trying to tell me something, they write it down. This doesn't help at all because the only characters I know are "people", "mountain", "middle", "kingdom", and the name of our city. Surprisingly these don't come up very often when people write things down for me, so I just stare at it for a while and think "hmm, that one looks kindof like a house. And it's next to a squiggly!"

Thursday Dan and I went to Qi Ao island, and after hiking around we found a restaurant on the beach. We were sitting in the shade and had a nice view of the Pearl River, old men fishing, and young brides getting wedding photos taken on the beach. Everything was going well, until the waiter brought our menu - which was all in Chinese. I stared at it, looking for "people" or "mountain" or maybe even "middle" until the waiter started recommending dishes to us. He started with the most expensive so we didn't say yes until he hit something in the 30 RMB area. This is what we got:



a duck and celery dish



and fried tofu and skinny mushrooms.

The duck and celery was good, but the fried tofu dish was amazing. When we paid for our meal I tried to ask the waiter what it was called, so maybe I could order it again. Unfortunately he only said "jige"* which even I know means "this one."

For my job, I'm teaching kindergarten and first year children's classes. Every child I teach is between the ages of 4 and 8. Their English is actually a lot better than my Chinese, but they frequently say Chinese words that I know, and that's exciting!
1 - they always call me "laoshi" (teacher)
2 - when I ask for volunteers they get really excited, raise their hands, and say "wo" (me)
3 - today I was teaching numbers to my youngest class and they kept using the Chinese numbers, which is about all the Chinese I know!

Anyway, soon I will be taking Mandarin classes from my school, and I have a number for a private tutor. One of the reasons I came to China is to learn Mandarin, so I'm going to be really serious about it. And I know it's my problem: I'm not one of those obnoxious westerners who says "why don't they speak English?" I'm in their country, I'm the one who needs to speak their language. I just find the combination of tones and characters ridiculously hard to pick up.


* - Note: I totally can't spell in pinyin but it's better than my Chinese characters!

The requisite first impressions post

Yes, it's a few weeks late, but I know everyone's going to ask all the same questions, namely:

How's the air?
Totally fine. It gets really hazy sometimes but that's mostly the humidity, I think.

How's the weather?
Very very hot and humid, though everyone claims fall is right around the corner and soon it will be cool. I still don't know how cold it's going to be in the winter, because most people I know who have been here for more than a year are Aussies. They use the metric system, which I think is code for "not really that cold." Supposedly it stays at a frigid 10 degrees all day long, but if you do the math that's actually 50. Last winter I would have stabbed my landlord in order for it to be 50 degrees in my apartment, so I'm really not concerned. Also, supposedly flowers bloom here year round.

How's your apartment?
Pretty nice! They gave us a run-around at first and sent Dan and me to separate apartments until our new one was ready. Even though the wait sucked, it was worth it. We live on the 18th floor and we can see the water and an island from our window. Both bedrooms are air-conditioned and so is the living room. We have a washing machine, a nice little balcony/breezeway for hanging up our laundry, and a tiny kitchen without an oven. But the previous tenants left the toaster oven, which is nice.

How's the water?
Chinese people don't drink it, and neither do I. We have bottled water in our apartment - we call a woman from our school when it's time to get a new bottle, and she's shocked at how much water we drink.

How's the traffic?
Completely insane. I may not be getting a bicycle after all.

How's the spitting/staring/other things I hear Chinese people do?
Though I have nothing to compare it with, I think this city is much more Westernized than most Chinese cities. It's one of the special economic zones, shares a border with Macao, and is an hour from Hong Kong, so they've seen a lot of white people before. Most of the staring is from little kids (adorable) and old men (not adorable). The streets are dirty compared to home, but again I think it could be a lot worse. I wash my feet a lot and I'm trying to get Dan to look down when he's walking.

How's the food?
Delicious, but not as spicy as I thought. Food is one of the big reasons I started this blog and I will definitely tell you more about it in the future.


Did I miss a question? Leave it in the comments.