day off

today was our first complete full day off, with no testing or GRE preparation duties. Dan and I decided to explore more of the city. First after a little time, we bought a bus map, which I hope will be indespensible as I want to learn how to get all over the city on buses. Buses are quite nice here, relatively clean and uncrowded (compared to Beijing) and they cost about 12 cents (1 kuai). We decided to go to Zhongshan park, or in English, yatsen park (after Sun Yatsen), the largest park in Qingdao. At the bus stop, we met a 15 year old girl and I had a very nice conversation with her about how Taiwan is a part of China, and that the Taiwanese should hold Hong Kong up as an example of how to integrate into the mainland's governmental system while still being autonomous. We also talked about American foreign policy towards Taiwan, Chinese development, and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. It was good practice for my Chinese, although I must say that I did not catch everything she said. Nonetheless, she was very friendly and talkative, we exchanged phone numbers, it will be a little strange to make friends with a 15 year old, but it will be good language practice, and she offered to show us around the city.
The park was nice, it had a little restaurant where I accidentally ordered "tofu with thousand-year-old-egg slices." The thousand-year-old-eggs are black pickled eggs, and I must say I am a little afraid of them. It was worse for Dan, who does not like hardboiled eggs to begin with. When the dish came, we both stared at the tofu in a brown sauce with chunks of black gelatinous looking egg. It did end up tasting better than it looked, and I even liked the tofu, although the egg was too much. We didn't get to see that much of the park, and I think we saw the more raggedy areas, including a closed amusement park, but there were some very nice parts including a rose garden. There was a zoo in the park, but we didn't go in. In the front, there were lots of colorful displays made of silk stretched over what looked like metal frames in the shapes of horses and people and gods and designs, we couldn't figure out what they were for, there was one about the 2008 olympics, so maybe they had something to do with that. In the park we met a middle aged couple who gave us some ice cream and practiced their english. They were very friendly, although sometimes their English was incomprehensible.
It is very hot here, and quite humid. The weather says we will have thunderstorms all week here, but so for it is just partially cloudy and in the 90s everyday.

rain

I have my last class in 45 minutes, it's the only one I have today. It will be nice because after that we will have the week off. This lasts only until summer classes start, which go during the week, but after summer is over, we start a schedule that is basically working 10-12 hour days on the weekends and then having the weekdays off, which is not a bad schedule, I guess. Today I spent my free time sleeping and looking at the rain. It started raining early in the morning, it was already going at it when I woke up at about 6:30, and then it didn't stop until noon. After about a half hour of sprinkling, it started pouring again and finally stopped at about 4pm. It was incredible, the amount of rain that fell. Looking out the window I could only see water. Our patio was flooded with water about 3 inches deep, then drained during the break, and then flooded again to about 3/4 inches with the second big storm. THere was no thunder or lightening though. I was also lucky, because I had heard that the buses stop running in rain and snow, but I was able to catch a bus with no trouble. This was right after the rain had stopped though, so hopefully there will be no trouble when it is raining.

One thing that hit me when I first got off the plane in Qingdao was the way it smelled. The sense of smell is neurologically linked to one's memory (the same receptors are found in both the olfactory bulb and the hipocampus, the site of memory and learning), but I had forgotten how powerful this connection can be. That smell that I associate with China, kind of a combination of dust, gasoline, people, and chinese food hit me in the warm evening I came and hasn't left; it permeates every street corner and sidewalk, and even the pores of my skin. I had forgotten it, but now I remember how much I smelled that scent in Beijing, it's not really a bad smell, just different. It's funny, when people ask me to describe what is so different about China, or even about Philadelphia, I am generally at a loss of words. Sure, I know they are very different, but I can't necessarily describe how. But now that I think about it, it's in those subtle ways-- the scent of the air, the street, even the chalkboard that makes China seem so foreign, and ultimately, makes it so real I am not in the United States.

First Day

So, I haven't posted in awhile, mainly because I have been working like crazy. I started teaching yesterday after more testing and class prep. The class is called "TPR" which means "Total Physical Response," otherwise known as how to teach English to children who don't really speak Chinese. The class consisted of about 20 hyperactive 5 year-olds, none of whom knew more than maybe 10 words in English. The youngest boy didn't look more than three, and he sat near the front (the desks were in a U shape) and when I wasn't looking erased whatever I wrote at the bottom of the chalkboard, drew on the board or the walls, and played with his toy gun and pokemon cards. At one point another boy stole his cards and then accidentally spilled water on them, a real crisis. The littlest boy also fell out of his chair and started crying, and the TA, an english major at Qingdao University, didn't know what to do with him so she just kind of held him in the air for a little while until he stopped crying and started kicking. I didn't speak much English in the class, instead I spent most of it yelling in Chinese ("don't hit her" "give back the marker" "give teacher your pokemon card"). This morning I had slightly older children, probably about 7-10 in two different classes. Although they are better behaved than the little children (they can at least sit in a chair and not hit people), they still do not seem to be completely focused on learning English. About 5 kids in each class have already gone over the lesson and know all the words and grammar, about 5 kids seem vaguely interested, and the rest (about 15) started playing or talking the minute you are not looking directly at them.

On another note, Qingdao establishments have the most interesting form of decoration. When we first got here, we were told that the building with the santa cutouts on the door was Lee Wen. We walked inside to find fake evergreen bows and colorful blinking christmas lights and merry christmas signs. At first I though maybe it was just Lee Wen, maybe involving learning about American holidays, but then we went to several restaurants, all of which also had santas and christmas lights. I guess it gives a new meaning to "Christmas in July.

all's well that ends well

So, we have now been in Qingdao for 1 1/2 days, and are finally getting more settled. Having our luggage back helps enormously, of course. As some of you know, we arrived in Qingdao with only 1 out of 4 bags, the others having mysteriously disappeared. My biggest fear was that because we didn't go directly to the luggage claim in Beijing (thinking erroneously that our luggage had been checked through) the Beijing airport personnel had confiscated our luggage and dumped it in some pit and we would never get it back. As it was, when we got to the carousel, it was empty and some airport man was wheeling off with a bunch of suitcases. We ran over and got one piece of luggage. The man said that there was no more, although I wasn't sure if there was a communication breakdown or not, given my rusty and jetlagged Chinese. I went to the lost luggage area and managed to communicate our situation, and the woman told us just to go to Qingdao and not worry about it. Of course, we couldn't help but worry when we arrived in Qingdao with no luggage. As it turns out, our luggage was actually still hanging around in Vancouver BC, where it decided to spend an extra day among the pine trees of the Pacific NW, and we managed to get it back last night. Not of course, with no hassle, as I managed to forget the luggage receipts, after being told repeatedly that what we needed to reclaim the luggage was the receipts, and after I spent much time making sure that I had put them in my purse. Sometimes you can't help feeling like a complete idiot. About half an hour of wheedling and pleading with some surprisingly sympathetic airport bureaucrats, we managed to get the suitcases after promising to fax the receipts the next morning (today).

hello everyone!

This is our first blog entry, we don't know if it will work, if you can all read it, so here we are trying.
Britta