Some new friends!

Kristen has been bugging Paul every time he goes to the market, because the first time she was there she saw something she really wanted. Since Kristen isn't the biggest fan of the market, it has been Paul who has been doing most of the shopping there on Saturdays, and each time he leaves, she is very vocal about asking him to bring home a goldfish (which he never does because his hands are full of food bags, and he has a fear of shaking a bag full of goldfish so hard while walking that he ends up with brain addled or dead goldfish).

This week, Kristen decided she was coming to the market as well. The result... two new friends! Meet Dragon and Fengle (means crazy in Chinese).

Here are some other photos from our trip to the market:

100 day old ages. A misnomer. They are actually only buried in the ground for thirty days or so, before being dug up and served (usually after bbqing) to their adoring fans. Can't bring ourselves to try them yet.

Quails eggs... I think.

The original jujube. Literally. These are Chinese red dates or as they are called in China: jujubes.

Aged, pickled "things" are commonplace at the market place. I am guessing these are pickled cabbages... could be pickled root veggies though. The bag on the right is raw (uncooked) peanuts.

Every kind of seafood you can imagine can be found here. Tiny snails, hermit crabs, seaweed, urchins... you name it (or point to it) they got it.

Numb and spicy

Things in China are sometimes so familiar seeming. You can walk into a shop and think, “ahh yes, Activia yogurt” or “mmm Oreo cookies” or “yum, that candy looks just like Swedish berries.” But oh, how the disappointment sucks! Instead of Activia yogurt, what you are really looking at is Activiian fermented milk product, instead of classic oreos you accidently pick up the green tea flavoured ones, instead of Swedish berries you get beef flavoured gelatine candy.

So many things look familiar, but really aren’t. Take potato chips. Hard to mess those up right? Well, have a look at some of the flavours below... some are delicious, and better than the ones we get at home. Others... not so much.

Personal favourite... they really do make your mouth numb.

Ikea Vodka



Ikea in China sells vanilla, apple, wild strawberry, plain and lemon flavoured vodka. Its delicious. We know from experience.

Hey Katrina- wish that they had this at home???



Dalian Part Deux (see below for the beginning)

Once we got over the being hopelessly lost and uncomfortable or in danger wherever we walked, Dalian appeared to be a pretty cool place. Polluted and decaying in some ways, absolutely brand new and sparkling in others.

We headed over to one of the major parks in town, where we wandered about for a few hours just enjoying the people watching and the hilarious amusement park that covered part of the hillside. One of the highlights of the day was chatting with an older fellow who spoke some English about why so many people were gathered in one area of the park. Apparently, every weekend, hundreds of people gather to try and meet singles in the hopes of arranging marriages. Well hundred of PARENTS gather to try and meet other parents of single men and women in the hope of helping their late twenties, early thirties children find suitable mates. Hey, in a country of 3 billion people, you wouldn’t think it would be especially hard to fins eligible marriage partners, but the one child policy and a desire to get ahead makes it pretty tough apparently.

Chinese "meat market"

Caligraphy in the park.

Chinese traditional musicians.

Paul watching a couple climb into the pond to catch turtles and put them in plastic bags- dinner?

Hilarious to watch the kids in these floating death traps!!

We wandered around a bit more, poking our head through back alleys and walking past decaying apartment buildings and fancy new malls (with Armani, Gucci, Mex, Calvin Klein, Omega, Hugo Boss stores and a rising wealth class of Chinese citizens who could buy a more expensive car then we own with the bling on their wrists – not to mention the clothes on their back!).

Random explosion- the smoke was green and red for a while.... no idea what the hell happened!

Before heading back to Jinshitan we took the light rail over to Metro and Ikea where we wanted to pick up a few things. We tried walking into Metro to pick up some imported groceries and were told we couldn’t come in without a membership card. Not sure what that was about because we had been in before without one, but hey this is China and things don’t make sense. We wandered over to Ikea and dropped almost a thousand yuan in about an hour! That’s about $150, and we did buy a really nice mattress topper for our uncomfortable bed. The only problem was, we now had to get everything home.

We debated trying to squeeze the almost six foot long bundle into a taxi for a while, but when we were somehow not able to find one after a few minutes (that NEVER happens in China) we decided we really didn’t need to spend the 150 yuan it would cost to taxi home. Instead we would just jump on the Qing guay  and ride the train home.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Seriously.

After we bought our tickets, we found out just how crowded the train can get on a Sunday afternoon. So crowded we couldn’t even squeeze on the first train that came by. So crowded that when the second train came, and Paul somehow managed to push himself, his bag and a six foot tall bundle of foam into the mass of humanity that was packed into the train, there was absolutely no way for Kristen to work up enough momentum to get herself and the remaining bag onto the train. No way possible. So Paul went on without her (nothing he could do, he was trapped by the sea of Chinese that had engulfed him and his awkward and anger inducing bundle) and took with him his wallet which happened to have all the money in it.

Resourceful Kristen snuck her way into a tiny space in between an older women and an incredible smelly man when train three arrived, and eventually managed to wheedle her way over to a seat that came available a few stops down the line. Paul finally worked a hand free and called her to find out she was ok. Unfortunately, she was pulled off the train by a disgruntled worker when the train emptied inexplicably a few stops later. Undaunted she jumped on the next train, and after almost two hours of being pushed up against other people, Paul and her were reunited at the Jinshitan station. One ride in a civilian-pickup-truck-posing-as-a-taxi later and they, and their bundle, finally made it home.

Moral of the story: take the taxi next time.

Doing up Dalian

Because we were feeling adventurous (and because we really needed some foam for our mattress from the Ikea store in town) we decided to spend Sunday in Dalian. We left for the Qing guy (pronounced “Ching way”) around 9:00ish and spent an hour or so riding the light rail line into Dalian. It was pretty comfortable as we got on at the first stop of the route and so had seats. Kristen did some marking, Paul read. All in all a pretty decent way to travel.

When we got into Dalian we realized we had done a fairly stupid thing. We had left our map of Dalian as well as our guidebook (which has a map of Dalian) at home. So we wandered around asking for a map in broken Mandarin and got laughed at by a woman who sold us the map for 5 kuay (slang for yuan and pronounce “ka why”). Not sure why she was laughing, but we definitely stood out as tourists. 

Paul trying to track his way around a city with a tourist map and no discernible landmarks.

Dalian is a city of 6.5 million and it certainly feels like it around the downtown core. We pushed our way through crowds of people filing through underpasses, negotiated the labyrinthine underground passages that tunnel under most of the city’s main roads. Doing this without getting elbowed in the ribs by an old lady, getting hassled by the thousands of vendors (selling watches, knock off bags, knock of clothing, real clothing, real cheap clothing, food, things that look like garbage but are probably food, jewellery, hair accessories, fake jewellery, fake hair accessories, small fluffy bunnies in cages, toys or nun-chucks), running into beggars with no legs or spat, coughed or sneezed on is no mean feat and isn’t exactly “comfortable”.

Paul took a picture when there was a second of calm. SO MANY PEOPLE EVERYWHERE!!!!!

On the other hand, it beats wading through traffic that doesn’t stop for pedestrians, doesn’t seem to care that you are walking across a crosswalk where the light indicates it is safe to walk, doesn’t obey any laws of the road or even of common sense. Unfortunately, this is the only option when underpasses aren’t available.

Walking in a Chinese city may one day make the X-games as a trial sport.

Playing like Chinese hillbillys

There are many things that we thought we might get the chance to do in China. Eat noodles. See the Great Wall. Learn to play Mah Jong.

 One thing we hadn’t planned on doing: shooting guns.

Thats Cam with a shotgun.

This weekend, we decided to get out and explore at least one of the many resort activities that Jinshitan is famous for. Cameron had a tourist guide in his apartment when he moved in, so we were flipping idly through it and came across the shooting range. This place had it all. Laser tag and paintball. Pistols. Rifles. Shotguns. Target shooting, clay pigeon range, heck it looked like they would even let you chase farm animals around the woods with guns for the right price. We were very intrigued.

On Saturday afternoon we tried to call the range to find out if they were open. Someone answered the phone, but our lack of a firm grasp on the mandarin language made conversation difficult. We weren’t able to get any solid information about the range being open to tourists, but we deduced that there was someone there answering phones so the probability of the range being open was looking pretty good.

With the help of some of Kristen’s students who were passing by, we managed to tell a taxi driver where we wanted to go, and set off into the back hills of Jinshitan. Jinshitan is spread out on a peninsula that forks into two smaller peninsulas. The school is on the one furthest from Dalian, the range is on the one that is closer. We got a chance to see a wide swath of Jinshitan on our way, which was really neat, since we are rarely in a vehicle that leaves the main road. We headed up in to the hills, past gated communities of vacation homes, construction workers manhandling huge culverts into ditches by hand, dogs on the side of the road, forests of bare trees lined up in row after man planted row, Tang dynasty hotsprings (?) and a field full of concrete dinosaurs, before arriving at the range.

The range was typically Chinese, in that it couldn’t decide quite what it was. There was a windmill (Dutch) built around one of the buildings, a totempole (North Pacific Aboriginal) with Mayan figures (Central American) on it, and a pagoda style roof on another building. No one building was clearly the office, so we just wandered around for a few minutes until a lady showed up followed by three men with guns. Yep, we were in the right place!

Kristen Rieu? Annie Oakley? You be the judge.

Within minutes we were ready to shoot. The men set up a pistol first and it was only after we pointed out that we wanted hearing protection that they found ear protectors for us. Paul shot first (his first time shooting a gun!) and he was pretty shaky with adrenaline. His first target wasn’t great (although 9 of 10 hit the target), but by the second time up, he was getting complimented on his shooting by the range attendants! Cam and Ryan shot next, and Kristen (after a few minutes of thinking through whether she really wanted to do this) got a few pointers from the “pistol-master” before going on to show that she could easily keep up with the boys when it came to accurately shooting guns.

Say hello to Paul's little friend...

The rifle came, and suffice it to say that Paul is a really good shot and Ryan should have brought his glasses!

The one on the left is Paul's...

Although shooting small calibre pistols and rifles was fun, it was time to take it up a notch. Paul and Cameron took turns firing a shotgun at clay pigeons, with Cameron taking the honours. Eventually we had spent our allotted budget of 150 yuan each (about $25) and we wandered around the rest of the property, taking a look at the paintball and laser tag field and watching a group of jacked up Chinese people run around in cammo shooting each other with what looked like space guns. Definitely something we will be trying out soon!

Might have to try that again soon!

Jinshitan

After "English Corner" (Conversation club) duty on Sunday, we decided we would stretch our legs a bit and walk around town. We left Susan's Pizza, which is a Western style restaurant run by a woman married to a former teacher - and the location for "English Corner"- and headed into the heart of Jinshitan.


Every time we walk around the town, I am struck by the fact that HEY, I LIVE IN CHINA!!! Even though things are often familiar, and we have settled down into a pretty comfortable routine, everyday something will jump out at you as being so... so ... Chinese.


For whatever reason, this walk was one long Chinese experience after another. Whether it was the dozens of little kids playing on the streets with their plastic guns and cute little mullet haircuts, the crazy mechanized and non-mechanized vehicles that are everywhere, the dumplings at the market, the huge, decaying tenement buildings, the bbqs on the side of the road selling kebabs and skewered silk worms, the trucks going by with loads of seaweed and five or six fishermen and women perched on top, or the incredible amount of cranes and construction going on everywhere, we were being made very aware of where we were.

Just one of the many weird and wonderful conveyances in Jinshitan.

Pretty typical building in Jinshitan.

Lots of new apartments going in for the summer tourists to  rent.

Someone lost a rooster....

Still decorations for Spring Festival (Chinese New Year)

Some more eats... China style!



Live (dying) fish in the market in Jinshitan

Dry fish at the same market



Spices at the market

Chicken head skewers, just one of many options that you can get grilled for you by a street vendor after a night of 2.5% beer and baijou (rice liquor)







Becoming “Maple Leafers”

Partly because we like to try and pile as much on our plates as we can, and partly because we like to be helpful, we have recently agreed to help out with some of the clubs and extra-curricular activities that are a large part of the Maple Leaf school community atmosphere here.

  Paul has taken on the assistant coach’s role for the ultimate Frisbee club.  Every Tuesday and Thursday 50-60 boys and girls get together on one of the campus turf fields to practice playing ultimate. The discs are great (custom made with the team name- “mallards”- on them) the field is wonderful and the skill level... well its varied to say the least. Many of the students have great technical skill with a disc, and can throw back and forehand passes (although it can be tricky to get any kind of long pass in with the serious wind that blows through here). What almost every student is lacking in is “field sense.”

Back home, it is fairly typical for kids to be enrolled in soccer, baseball, lacrosse, hockey, etc. when they are five years old. We grow up playing sports and many students will play some sort of sports out in the community as well as in their gym class in elementary or high school. This isn’t the case in China where many parents never played sports, and few encourage their children to play sports unless they show a particular aptitude (at which point, sport becomes EVERYTHING). Many of the Maple Leaf students have never played organised, competitive sports, so teaching them how to find open space, lose a check, make cuts and generally not run into each other is the focus of most of our practices. The students are eager to learn and Adam (another teacher and the other coach) is great at coming up with drills that the players can use in game situations. So far it has been a LOT of fun!!!

Kristen also signed herself and Paul up for conversation club and movie night. Once a month teachers meet with students in an informal setting (a local cafe owned by an ex teacher) and just chat. The goal it to help the students work on their English conversation skills in a way that is fun for both the teachers and the students. We have our first “shift” tomorrow. Should be great! Either way we get free coffees and fries so really, it doesn’t matter!

For movie night, both of us will chaperone a Friday or Saturday night showing of an English movie for the high school girls who don’t have passes to leave campus. It gives the girls something to do, and they are always looking for teachers to sponsor these events so that they can get permission to gather together and watch a movie. Our first night is next weekend, and we think that the movie will be Wall.E. Which just happens to be a favourite of ours.

Marching to a different beat...

At Maple Leaf, one of the things you are most likely to notice about the students is that they live a much more regimented life then say, your average North American teenager. The schedule for the middle school students weekday is something like:

6:00-6:30 Get up and make beds, change etc.

6:30 -7:10 Eat Breakfast at the cafeteria

7:20-7:40 Morning reading (study period- sometimes group study led by one of the students who is the assigned classroom leader, sometimes individual study time).

7:50-9:30 Classes one and two

9:30-10:10 Either the weekly flag raising ceremony or exercise break (tai chi, aerobic stretching, marching, jogging, etc.)

10:10-11:50 Third and Fourth class

11:50-13:30 Lunch at the cafeteria and a forty-five minute nap at the dorms.

13:40-17:20 Classes five through eight, with a ten minute break at three thirty for eye exercises.

17:20-18:10 Supper at the cafeteria

18:10-18:20 Reading and writing practice in Chinese and English

18:20 20:00 Two periods of self study time.

21:15 Bedtime for grades seven and eight.

20:10-20:50 Last period of self study for grade nines.

22:00 Bedtime for all students, lights automatically turn out in all the dorms.

As you can see, the days are pretty packed for most of these kids. It may seem like an incredible amount to ask teenagers and preteens to do, but the fact is that most of them seem to be able to handle it. Sure, many students are tired, and some do try to sleep in class, but the majority are alert, energetic and want to learn, study and succeed. The goals of many of these students are very high, and they are constantly reminded by the Chinese staff and their peers and parents of the need to work hard to achieve their goals. It doesn’t leave much free time for the students, but they are always playing between classes, and almost all take part in at least a few clubs (which usually take place after supper or in block seven every other week) where they recreate and “cut loose” a little.

Maybe it has something to do with equating regimentation with successful study and achievement, or maybe there is some other reason for it but the students are often seen marching from one building to another or from class back to the dorms in their homeroom groups. Not sure exactly what the reasoning is but it is definitely something t watch the four hundred grade sevens and eights marching home to the dorms after evening study.

Marching in front of the flags where we do flag raising ceremonies on Mondays.

P.E. Class...

Fireworks continued

Fireworks~

Street Food!

Stands outside of Trustmart = Korean bbq wrap, fried potstickers, chor (kebabs) for less then five bucks! mmmm...

Our tofu guy at the market with his fresh tofu

Market goodies.

Some of the options at the chicken lady's stand (we get the breasts for cheap because they are considered inferior cuts here!)

Ultimate favourite dumplings- jiao ze. Pork filled, red bean paste filled, garlic and onion filled... you name it, Paul eats it!

Ahh the Great White North!

  

Recently, it snowed here in Jinshitan, making it feel even more like we had actually been tricked into boarding a plane ride to Prince George instead of China. Same smell of industry, similar shades of gray and brown, dead foliage, plastic bottle decorated streets and now even the snow!

In any case, we decided to be brave, and head out into the icy weather (wind chill made it minus 14 C) and make a sojourn down to the beach. Paul had been complaining about living just minutes away from the ocean without having yet gone to see it, and so had promised himself -loudly, and publicly- to make it to the beach before the weekend was over. Somehow he managed to convince Kristen to come with him on this trek despite the weather and off they went into the snow.

Here's Paul doing his best impersonation of Hello Kitty

Most of the other teachers were sensible enough to stay home, but many of the Chinese citizens were not so lucky. On the way to the beach, Paul and Kris dodged trucks full of municipal workers who would get off periodically to shovel a side road by hand, or clean up what the snow plow had missed. They even got to watch a pizza delivery man struggle through three or four inches of snow on his scooter, balancing his pizzas on his lap, while his hair was crusting with snow.

Sampans along the shore at the Jinshitan fishing village

Anyways, we made it down to the beach and got our first view of the Yellow sea. It was really beautiful, and actually kind of mystical with all the fog and snow and wind around, but we definitely are hoping that we will soon be able to make a stroll to the beach without having to bundle up like hedgehogs getting ready to hibernate.

Despite our best efforts, we were unable to restrain Kristen's cheeks from bursting forth from her protective scarf wrapping every few minutes...

China has many cultural achievements.....

Take for instance this artistically designed and iced cake!



And this tableau of the Venus de Milo and some elephants....

Teaching

Both of us are now settled in to our roles as teachers and have finally figured out our teaching assignments. It took a while to get things sorted out for a multitude of reasons: from new students arriving in bunches weeks after the start of the semester, to the junior high not starting for a week after the high school; from teachers not being able to make it to the school for the first day of class because of visa issues, to students moving from one class to another because of their English level. In any case, we now know what classes we will be teaching for the rest of the semester, and can dig into prepping and planning for them.

Kristen is teaching four blocks of ESL classes on the girls high school campus (each block is 75min). Her girls are in grade nine, but because grade nine students in China spend the second half of the school year studying for exams rather then learning any new material, they have been sent to Maple Leaf to practice their English and get their fluency up in order to pass the entrance exams for the Maple Leaf high school. Kristen is teaching two classes of girls both Language Arts (reading and writing skills) and Communication Studies (oral and aural language). She is teaching those students with a higher level of English fluency among the new intake, and is working with several other teachers to prep and plan the course material (which builds off material made in previous years). 

Paul is teaching 6 blocks of Science for grade eights and 2 of ESL English for grade sevens (each block of which is only 45min long). He sees each block three times a week. Because the english level of these students is so low, he often has a Chinese assistant (who by the way has a masters from a Canadian university and has taught for several years... which makes Paul feel wholely underqualified!) work with him to explain some of the harder science vocabulary terms. He is working with this assistant (Xu Meng- Vicky) and another teacher (Petra- from Comox) to develop this new program, which is a pet project of the owner of the school. No pressure! He also teaches two classes of grade sevens an ESL English program with less structure, and a focus on writing. 

The students here are so much fun to work with. Sometimes they are tired (they work long hours and live in dormitories... who wouldn't be at least a little tired!) and  sometimes they are high energy, but the class management problems that you would see in a Canadian school are basically non-existent. In fact at the Junior High school, each class has a class leader. This is a student who has been appointed as the class manager: he or she will stand up and tell the class to calm down if they are getting too loud, will call out a student who is not trying hard enough, or will approach the teacher about students who are struggling. It takes a little while to wrap your head around for a teacher who isn't used to it, but so far, the system has worked really well!

The students seem pretty happy to have "Mr. B and Miss Rieu" (our noms de guerre as it were) as their teachers. Mr. B even recieved a tetra pack of milk from one of his students after he casually mentioned that his wife was having a difficult time finding milk that she liked!