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.