Wo de putonghua BuHao

Xiamen island from top of hill behind Nan Putuo Temple.

The mandarin phrase in the title is a phrase I have gotten to know quite well over the past few weeks. It means My mandarin is very bad. Granted it is much better than what it as when I first came to Xiamen, but I still mess up enough tones to make it hard for people to understand me. When you mess up the phrase “my mandarin is very bad” people usually get the idea that it is really bad. The toughest things for me to figure out about this language are the tones, one word, said with four different inflections means 4 different things, which is needless to say, confusing. The second thing is the chinese sentence structure. As I start to understand the sentence structure I gain a better perspective on my students “Chinglish” english words in a chinese sentence structure.

I am beginning to get more and more acclimated to this place, I notice this the other day when I nearly got hit by a car for the umpteenth time and didn’t flinch or even make a fuss. Also when seeing older people spit copious amounts of phlegm onto the ground in front of me or in any direction I didn’t bat an eye, I still think it is disgusting, but it is just something I have gotten used to. The biggest thing I have gotten used to is the weather and the temperature, I now consider “cold” to be around 55-60 degrees. When it gets below about 65 I need to wear a jacket now. In other words, I have become a huge wuss, my apologies for those currently living in 20-30 degrees in Minnesota. Beginning to understand a bit more of the language hasn’t hurt either.

Thanksgiving here was a pretty quiet affair, one of the teachers found a place where they had live turkeys, you picked one out, they killed it, plucked it, and gave it to you to cook. So we did have some turkey, various attempts at mashed potatoes, some corn, and chinese cabbage, as well as sweet and sour chicken with rice. It was about the best Thanksgiving one could hope for in China. I hope yours was great wherever and whomever you spent it with.

Last Friday some other teachers and I participated in a roundtable discussion on U.S. government, and how it worked, and differed from than of China, it was really interesting to talk with students in a closer setting where they could ask you any question about U.S. politics, the difference between state and federal laws, etc. The apartment search had ended last week with us finding a nice place that we all agreed upon. However last week one got word that a parent in their family has become severely ill, so they will have to return home in February. So, we will not be getting that place, on a more important note though it is important for them to be with their family during this time. In case you were wondering, I am keeping their name out of this to respect their privacy.

We also finally received word on the school planned trip, which will be happening on December 14th to Wuyi Mountain, not exactly the Shanghai trip we had all been hoping for, but it is supposed to be a beautiful place to travel to nonetheless. It is located in the Northwest of Fujian province, or the province I am located in right now, hopefully it will be snowing!

Wuyi Mountain Area...according to google images





Pictures of Different Buddhist god in ceramic figurine form on the walk up the hill behind Nan Putuo Temple.

Thats about all from me, I’m off to play beach football and take advantage of a 70 degree day on November 28th! Thanks for all your emails and hopefully life is treating you well wherever you are. Enjoy it.

The Epic Battle

When some of you read this title, you may think to yourself something along the lines of good vs. evil. I propose to you however, a battle older than perhaps time itself, I am referring of course to Man vs. Spider. Last Thursday morning while I was preparing to shower, I turned on my water heater, it was the same as any other day. Once I got into the shower, I grabbed the shower head and began to wash, unfortunately for me the shower head slipped out of my hands, spraying water behind the water heater, which forced a "neighbor" to come scurrying out from behind the water heater and into the shower, over the shower door, and behind the toilet.
This neighbor was a spider the size of my hand. As many of you may know, I am not very fond of spiders. Upon seeing this one, I screamed like a little girl, opened the door to my room, and ran into the hallway, about 10 feet into the hallway I realized that I was nude. So I stepped back into my room with my heart pounding. Then I slowly walked back into my bathroom, and grabbed the only weapon I could find to defend myself from this great foe, the plunger. With the plunger in one hand, and the shower head in the other, I forced the great beast back into the shower from behind the toilet, once pushed back into the shower, I sprayed it with continual bursts of water until I deftly trapped it under the mighty plunger. However, two of it's legs were still sticking out and twitching, so I brushed my teeth and got out of the bathroom as soon as I could, leaving the behemoth to be dealt with later.

In class that day I told the story to my students, who praised my spider battling abilities, but mostly just laughed at me as I reenacted the parts where I screamed like a girl, and pretended to run around. I also told them about halloween, and we did a pretty interesting lesson on how to make a jack-o-lantern. We didn't have any pumpkins though, so it was all done with pictures, but they were fascinated nonetheless.

Halloween here was a blast. I went as a clown, but a clown you would be more likely to see in a city like San Francisco. Ben went as a nude devil, and steve was "spider man at 50" due to his growing gut, and his unhealthy appetite for McDonald's here. We had a great time, and ben and I won the costume competitions, each winning a free bottle of Vodka, and some free drinks. We have become good friends with some of the bartenders at a bar we frequent, and even helped them to create various halloween drinks the night before Halloween.

More recently I have joined the Xiamen touch rugby team. It has been a great time, we meet every sunday and play rugby for 3 hours. The are planning to travel around china, and play touch rugby against other teams made up of foreigners. The team here in Xiamen is made up of guys from the U.K., New Zealand, the U.S., South Africa, Mexico, Denmark, and a couple other countries.

Other than that classes are rolling right along, I am having the students do debates this week, with some of the more interesting ones concerning Gun Control laws in the U.S. and how they could be applied to China. They also enjoy talking about the 1 child policy, as well as Iraq, but I am trying to shy away from that. We are still looking for an apartment, and most likely won't move into one at the earliest next week, because we are all pretty broke, and don't get paid until next monday.

This is a picture of the view I see from the balcony in the guest house, it is a pretty mountainous area around here. What you can't see is the Nan Putuo Temple, which is a huge buddhist temple surrounded by a botanical garden, with ponds filled with turtles and fish, both of which hold special significance for Buddhists. A week ago, we were coming back from watching a live NFL game, and around 4 am the temple was packed with people, so we went inside, and watched as people bowed to various forms of the buddha, and lit incense, according to my tutor, it had to do with the lunar calendar reaching September 18th. I couldn't quite understand everything she was saying, but I'll try and figure out more info for my next post.

This is a picture of the beach, which is a five minute walk from where I live. Hundreds of ships and smaller fishing boats cross this stretch every day. I take a ferry across this water to go teach at the ZhangZhuo campus, which is on mainland China, and not Xiamen island. The sand isn't too bad, however I wouldn't recommend swimming in the water, because at low tide you see many large pipes draining some liquids into the water. Such is China...





The Beach



Hello to all of you back home, or in various parts of the world. Thank you for your emails, I will try to keep you updated on my happenings. By the way, I can go to the beach on a 75 degree day in November, so I guess you could say life is pretty good. Hope it's nice back in Minnesota or wherever you are!