Random Chinese Madness

Here's some strange sights that we've seen since we have been here.

The Chinese seem to have an obsession with animal porn. These "top sellers" were nestled quite normally amongst the top sellers. The titles included: Aardvark, Lion, Zebra. But my favourite was featuring China's very own near extinct beauty, The Panda. (My Favourite means funniest that I saw, not favourite to watch).

Dog Sellers are everywhere. Whilst at one point its good to see that people are embracing dogs as pets a bit more- rather than just a meaty alternative to chicken- its quite upsetting to see them treated so badly. The people were not too happy with us taking their photo, we left quickly and I think they scarpered soon after as well.


Its no wonder that China has struggled to shake its drug dependance from the opium dens of old if they continue to sell it in bags in supermarkets!

Japan gets late night "Tokyo Drift" street racing in Skylines and Evo's. Shijhizhuang gets this dashing little red number- better snap one up now,theyr'e flying out of the forecourts!

Donkey

Believe it or not the strange Sea objects are probably not the strangest things Dave and I have eaten so far. Neither are the flat peices of pork on a stick. The award of "strangest food we have eaten so far" goes to Donkey and Potato Wrap.

We had just moved Sandy's stuff for her and were walking home. I asked Sandy if she had eaten- she replied yes, she had a Beef pancake wrap. Sounds lovely we thought and asked if she could take us to get one. So off we trotted.

We watched the lady take the leg of beef (sic) and chop it into small peices and mix in potato, onion and peppers and put it all in the wrap. She then poured some sauce over the wrap. We inquired to Sandy what it might be, she said what we thought was dunpling 3 times, then clear as day, as if all other sound in the area was wiped out, we heard "donkey sauce". She said they cooked the meat in there and then took it out and used the remaining water as sauce- kind of a consumee.

So we thought we were at least eating Beef wrap with Donkey sauce-although we did wonder what had happened to the meat from the pot. Then talking to Sandy a few days later about her mistake, she admitted that she had made another mistake and that the whole thing was in fact donkey.

Still tasted Lovely though.

I'm Sorry Topsey- pet donkey that I had for 10 years.

Sandy's House

Sandy is the Chinese lady that is in charge of looking after us.
She keeps assuring us that she works extremely hard and is in the "busiest person in the whole school". We don't always agree, but she eventually got us Internet so she's done something right!

Anyhow we- Dave and I- helped her move flat (we even offered to decorate for her-she declined) and so she invited us round for dinner. She lives with a student (nothing suspect going on!) and so his mother had come round to cook. The family was lovely and Dave took a shine to one particular female member of the family!

The dinner consisted of Prawns, Fresh Fish, Crab, Spare Ribs and some strange black pods with white filling which no one could explain anything to us about other than "they come from the sea, down south". The whole meal was lovely and, as you can see from the photo, there was no concerns over whether or not it would be fresh!

NIGHT OUT

So...we were told that there was a bar.

A bar where all the foreigners met.

All we knew was that it was on the other side of town and that it was in a arcade between a McDonalds and a KFC. But seeing as there is a KFC every block, and McDonalds isn't exactly rare, this wasn't as easy as it might hae seemed.

We walked and we walked and we walked. It gave us a good chance to explore another part of town that we didn't even know existed and go into 2 more massive Malls. Eventually we found it. We settled in and had a quiet celebrationary drink, and made plans to return the next saturday.

These are some pictures from that night. It ended much much messier than these pictures even begin to suggest.

Firstly we went for a meal in Pizza Hut. I'll introduce you to all the other people:
On the left (front to back) Meredith, Hilary - daves bird, Becky
On the Right (front to back) Dave, Me, Brock, Zack.

We live with Meredith, Becky and Brock. They are friends with Hiliary and Zack from home and they have become are drinking partners on the weekend as well. They teach at the university in the city, but their gates get locked at 11pm so they have to come back to ours to sleep over, which unfortunately leads to more drunken mayhem when we get back to the flat.

MAO

On the Walk to the Bar we managed to accidentally stumble over our first intake of Culture for the trip. The Statue of Chairman Mao. This photo actually taken later on, on the 30th Anniversary of his death. We were all surprised that there wasn't a bigger fuss being made taking into account how respected and revered he is by everyone. Its a fairly cool statue, and theres a massive museum that makes Bloomfield road look small behind which we hope to investigate soon, when we get bored of shopping and drinking.

Shiz by Day

These are some of my photo's from our first few adventures downtown.

From our apartment its about 20 minutes by bus-which costs 1 Yuan (about 15p)- or 10 minute by taxi which costs 13 Yuan (about 80p).

Downtown is pretty commercial. I never realised how big it would be. We got to the bridge that you see in one of the pictures and presumed that that was the end of the city centre, it wasn't until later that we bumped into some other english in a Cofee shop that we discovered it got even busier the other side- and that the Bar was somewhere to be found over there.

Bikes are the most dangerous thing we have so far encountered in China- suicidal taxi drivers included- everytime we step into a road one seems to come hurtling towards us. One even aimed for Dave in a awkward "you first","no you first" kind of fashion. But so far we ahve been unscathed. Even considered buying a bike ourselves. Outside of the Malls there are litterally hundreds of bikes parked. You pay the attendant 1 Yijau- which is .10 of a Yuan and you can leave it there all day, and he'll stop it being stolen. Makes for quite a nice picture.

The Flight

These are some pictures from the airport and our arrival. The picture of Clare and I is quite nice and was taken as Dave and I were hearded through the extra secrutiy beacons at Heathrow- in the background you can clearly see Dad looking particurlarly uninterested and mum trying to work out how to use her camera! as usual!

When we said goodbye to family and Clare, we made our way through to departures and had a few beers to steady our nerves and prepare us for the journey ahead. Think we managed about 4 in total. We then bummed about the airport waiting to board, wasting time by buying magazines and books tthat we hope will keep us occupied in the long period of time ahead.

The flights were pretty uneventful. My favourite moment came on the flight to France, when Dave asked the hostess for a Lager 5 times and she failed to understand until he just had to say (rather loudly) "A BEER". At this juncture I made the comment that if he got on this well if a French Air Hostess who is fluent in English imgaine the joy that faces us in the months ahead!

When we got to Paris we spent some time in the shops, but they were pretty useless and tried to spot who else would be joining us in China, as we knew of at least 1 other person that was on our flight and on the same scheme- it turns out that he missed the flight however- retard!

The flight from Paris to Beijing was 9 hours long. When we got on we made a mental list of people we didnt want to sit next to, think everyone does that when they board a plane- i'm probably pretty high up on most other peoples!- and to our pleasure we hadn't been sat by any of them. However, we then saw the huge fatty that we notice waiting in the line, who stank of BO. He looked straight towards us and marched over, we buried our heads in agony, but Dave's delight he turned in one row early and sat right in front of me, and proceeded to lower his chair all the way back- basically on to my lap. The boy who eventually sat next to us was chinese, and our fluent language skills being what they are, we said nothing to him.

After take off we headed to the back of the plane and found some empty rows and managed to spread out 3 seats each, so sleeping was much much easier. THe food on the plane was surprisingly good, and the entertainment was a choice of films- i watched "inside man", "RV" and "iceage 2". All were quite good- "inside man" particulalrly so.

We landed in Beijing at about 10am. We headed to Baggage Collection and after about 30 minutes realised we were waiting at the wrong carosell- start as we mean to go on. Once we got those we headed to meet our taxi. The American's, our fellow teachers, had been waiting since 5am and, seeing as it was now nearly 1130am, were ready to go. So we were ushered straight out of the airport and into the cab. This meant that we didnt get to change any money and were left broke for the first 4 days of our trip! Great!

Due to the terroist nonsense at home Dave and I had been quite restricted on what we could bring. Only 20kg, and a very small hand luggage allowance that was basically laptop and nothing else. Imagine our envy when all the americans- Brock, Becky and Meredith- had 2 bags each, each one weighing more than our two put together and 2 bits of carry on luggage. Becky has 7 pairs of shoes to my one! Brock couldnt believe that we only had one luggage trolley between the two of us. The taxi was so loaded when we got their I think its a good job we didnt take more.

The taxi ride was exciting. Of course the usual ice breaker conversations were had- but we were all so lagged that I'm sure that anything interesting was just instantly forgotten anyway. The taxi driver appeared to be a maniac- we now know he was just normal- and loved overtaking on the wrong side of the road with traffic approaching. I managed to fall asleep but not for long as the windows started leaking and water poured all over my shoulder.

We were knackered when we eventually arrived- via a rather good road side restuarant- and were greated by the grim sight of our street in the pouring rain. Whilst we are all pretty keen on it now, at the time Dave and I both thought we had pitched up in down town Beirut and were in for a less than enjoyable 6 months.

Shiz by Night

Shijiazhuang is quite a nice city, not massive but perhaps just the right size for us. Any bigger and I think we'd feel out of our depths and definitely more likely to run into angry triads who are determined to keep "china for the chinese".

The centre is quite normal by the day but at night it comes alive. I've never been to Vegas or anyother really big cities where neon lights are prevalent so I love just wondering around and looking at the sights. Some of them look absolutely amazing.

The city centre itself is good. We've been in about 6 massive shopping malls so far, all selling a mix of western clothes and chinese knock offs, for a decent price. We've also managed to find a few shops that sell english dvds for 70p each, so we've been filling our boots with those in order to keep us busy, during our downtime.

Shijiazhuang No.42 Middle School

We teach at No.42 Middle School, which is right across from our apartment. Which is good in the fact that we can come back and laze around during the day, and that it only takes 2 minutes to get to work (apart from sometimes if the road is particularly deadly) but bad because we have Chinese teachers in our block who seem keen to report any acts of coming in late, or drunkeness, to the powers that be.

The school is massive. There is some 6000 children in total (I teach 630) and over 500 staff. I think about 3000 of those kids live in at the school for the whole time. The accomodation is no where near as nice as ours but at the same time wouldn't look a miss in spain or somewhere.

On our first day in the school there was a massive welcoming ceremony where all 6000 kids were packed into the playground, actually more like hearded by a guy with a mega phone, and then we had to sit through an agonizing hour of speaches and recitals in english and chinese- but it was an awesome spetacle. We thought we would have to get up and introduce ourselves, which was a daunting propect, but in the end one of the american girls just did a general "hello" from everyone.

The kids that we have met are all pretty nice, sometimes a bit boysterous, and we play football with a different group almost everyday. You will be pleased to learn that Dave and I are yet to lose a single game- but we are playing against 18 year old dwarfs most the time, so perhaps we shouldn't!

MY Apartment

So this is my apartment. As you can see, from the outside it looks more suited to Downtown Sarajevo, or even worse Spalding, than it does China, but inside its more than we could hope for.

We arrived with amazingly low expectations, cockroaches everywhere, concrete floors, holes everywhere, but as you can see its rather nice- probably nicer than anything I lived in at Uni.





As you can see the Bedroom was custom made to my desires, amazingly it came already with the Harry Potter posters- I really cannot escape him, Dave has even got his bloody class kids calling me it as I walk around School.



Whilst the toilet/wash room looks a bit scabby. Its multi-functional ability is amzing:Go to the loo, take a shower and be sick into the drain all at the same time. Its a dream. I think once I can be arsed I will clean up properly and have it looking nice.



This is the Kitchen, just through the doors is a balcony area which is home to my Gas Burner. I would love to say that I've cooked many fine authentic Chinese meals, but sadly I havn't even turned it on yet. When you pay 70p for a 3 course meal it hardly seems worth the effort of turning on the burner and then doing washing up.

INTERNET AT LAST

So, I returned home after a hard day at the office (class room) to find that after 3 weeks the internet has finally been connected in our rooms. This only happened after I went to the teacher in charge of the matter - who quite frankly doesn't know her arse from her elbow, but at the same time is a lovely lady - and threatened to strike on Monday unless we had the internet. After being promised it would come "tomorrow" for the last two weeks and after shelling out about 300 Yuan on Phone Cards (sounds alot but its only £20) we finally have it, so updates will be more frequent and photos are on the way!

School has been good this week, I'm started the first of about 5 lessons on Family and Friends. I taught them the English for the main family members- father,mother,sister,brother etc and then had them stand up and introduce their family. We then went round the class and described each other-which is setting them up for drawing a picture of their family and describing how the members look differently from them - taller, stronger, fatter etc.

Lost my temper with a few classes and really had to lay down the law as in some no one bothered to do the homework. I know that these kids are at school from 6am to 10pm and they have a lot more important work to do, but I only asked for a flipping picture so they could have at least done something 5 minutes before the lesson or whilst I was collecting everyone elses in.

I also sent one boy outside for being annoying, broke one lads glasses and made one perfectic species cry- knew I was cut out for this teaching lark. Easy As 1-2-3!

First days as a Teacher

Have managed to find an internet cafe where we can get onto the internet to update this. But there appears to be some movement on the internet in our rooms front- 2 chinese men turned up, drilled a hole, dropped off a modem and disappeared- apparently we should be able to access it in a few days. When that works we can finally start putting photos up, and updating more regularly.

Teaching started yesterday. My first class was 7.45am in the morning and I didn't really have a clue what to do-in all honestly I was useless. I teach 21 different classes each week, each of 30 odd children, so the chances of me learning any of their names of ever recognising the kids outside of the class are remote to zero. Teaching 21 classes does infact mean I have to repeat the same single lesson 21 times in one week- which can get pretty tedious, as you can imagine.

Most of the kids are aged between 11-13 and are all pretty friendly and speak good english for their age. A few are little buggers but I've only had one who has seriously annoyed me so far- I asked him a question and instead of answering he looked down at his watch and did a countdown of 10..9..8...7 etc until the school bell rang. I said "very clever, but don't think about doing it again, else I'll knick your watch".

Some of the classes are hard work and don't seem to want to participate, but most are fine and as time goes on I've got this particular lesson-on introducing yourself and what did you do in your holidays- down to a fine art.

I've not a clue what to teach next week though!!

Arrived. Safe and Wet.

Hi all,

Dave and I have both arrived safely in Srijuizuhang now. Its been really hot since we got here, but have had thunder and rain storms on 2 out of 3 days so far.

Our accomodation is in a pretty terrible building, but our rooms are superb, you'll see picutres later. The only problems have been with the Toilets- i.e mine not flushing and Dave's leaking toilet water all over the floor once he flushes it- I think I got the long straw there.

Food has been fine so far- 2 massive banquets for about a quid each, but we can't order ourselves as NO ENGLISH is spoken anywhere.

Anyhow, more next week when we get internet installed in the rooms.

Take Care all

Charlie

Shijiazhuang

So Dave and I depart for China in 10 days. I'm fully jabbed and injected and should be protected against anything the People's Republic can throw at me; unless i'm bitten by a dog (as you had to pay for the rabies jab) or Bird Flu strikes (don't think that there's much anyone can do in that instance).







After seeing Daves blog - http://ihatechinesefood.blogspot.com and his guide to Shijiazhuang I thought i'd better put some information up on here about it too, that way I might actually learn something about where it is i'm going-but I doubt i'll ever be able to say it if I'm honest.

Shijiazhuang is an industrial town about 2.5 hours south west of Beijing, and is relatively new having only been established in th 1950's. It doesn't have much to see there but I don't think it looks too boring from the photo's and luckily it is one of the major transport hubs in China, so getting about should be alright as well.

If you look carefully, in the last picture you can see a KFC. So I we should be able to survive at least a month!

My BBQ.

So my parents went away a few weekends back so I thought it might be a good idea if I had a little gathering. Kind of a late Birthday/early leaving barbeque.

In my dads absence it meant that the BBQ responsibilites were left up to me. Now, here's my excuses: at college we had one of those new fangled gas type of barbecues, where you plug it in, light the gas and hey presto, control the temp with a flick of a switch. My dad, being a bit of a traditionalist about these type of things, refuses to have such a contraption, and insistson an old school coal affair-even if they are now more expensive than there more modern replacements. This lead to me battling against a towering inferno and singed eyebrows in order to cook. When the burgers eventually escaped the furoure of the fire they were nicely charcoled and black, but after the first few it did calm down and eventually every thing else turned out fine.

Without the parents in tow it was a lot more laid back than previous bbq's held at mine; just a group of 10 friends, eating, drinking, playing football and ultimate frisbee and having a decent time. Festivities started at 4pm and started to tail off about 4am so it was a 12 hour-a-thon. I'm sure a decent time was had by all, and no one complained of sever dissentry in the morning,so the cooking was a success on my part as well.

The main event of the night was the ultimate frisbee competition, a closley fought battle between two evenly matched teams, using the area inside the gazebo's as the goal zone. I was pretty terrible at this and think I've found a (non-female only) sport that Clare is probably better than me at, as even in her drunken state she managed to catch it a few times, which is more than I did, and score a few goals.

Thanks to everyone that came at such short notice, especially to Rich and Ross that came all the way down from up N'arth and only managed to get lost once- thanks to Ross. Also John, who came despite breaking his foot the day before.

Cheers