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.
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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."