More Photos

Finally I can post those photos I mentioned in the last text post.  Things are crazy here.  Just finished marking all 150 of my English college exams and just under half of the students failed (less than 60% in China), which is fair since less than half of those students decided to never show up to my class.  So of course they're not going to pass my exam.  On top of this, there is a big cultural difference between China and the west when it comes to cheating and plagiarism.  I made it very clear to them that cheating will not be tolerated during my exam but of course it was hard to enforce.  There is a lot of pressure from the administration to pass as many students as possible despite their acknowledgement of the cheating going on which makes sense since the education industry is a very competitive business in China.  Ultimately, though, I have the final say when it comes to these matters and even though most of them cheated, almost half failed anyway so I think it's perfectly fair.
Aside from work, my roommate and I have been planning to head to Qingdao on Monday morning to spend new year's eve with the all the other foreign teachers who booked rooms at a hostel there.  We will probably stay until Wednesday afternoon or evening.  We've never been before, so we are really excited and also just getting out of Weifang for a few days will be very welcome after a long few months of hard work.

Ilya all swanked out at the foreign language college Christmas party.

Ilya and I holding the fort just before my college English final examination.

Laurel and everyone partying it up on Christmas eve.

Not sure I remember what we were doing here tbh but it looks like we were having a good time.

Using static to keep my holiday decorations in place.

The calligraphy book I bought.

My (new) Chinese name!  I totally forget how to interpret it already.

Maeva, a French teacher who lives three floors below us, performing at MBox, a local bar, a few months ago.

OOooohh that's how to read it.

Very helpful.  This will come in handy in the future...

One of the Chinese teachers addressing everyone before the festivities began.

Pretty lights at the party.

Some of my favourite dishes at a dumpling restaurant near the university.  From left to right; beef dumplings, a cabbage dish cooked with fish (center square dish), a raw garlic and vinegar sauce for dipping the dumplings into (bottom), and a popular egg and tomato dish.

There is a wall in one of the training schools that is covered with profiles of all the foreign teachers.  Included is a picture I gave them and a Chinese version of my resume.  Pretty nifty, eh?

The teacher wall.

A sea of ice a few days after the snowstorm that hit the city, just near the north entrance to the university.  Since so many students walk over the snow, it becomes very icy and dangerous, but also pretty at night.

mmmm hot pot.

Some nights I like to go out and get food from the conveniently serviced outdoor mobile vendors that are so popular with the students.  They can always be found here even in the cold.  Here is a picture of two merchants cooking up some meat, lettuce, potato, and egg stuffed wraps.  Delish.

My boss, George, and I with our hats on just before visiting a middle school.

The Russians.

Maeva and I at the Christmas party.

Christmas in Weifang

Today and yesterday were definitely highlights of my entire China experience.  This week is the first week of exams for our students, so that means it is also the first week we are officially off the hook for teaching college classes, which therefore means we only need to work on the weekends now until our six weeks off!  So basically, it's all smooth sailing from here, after a very intense last few weeks in December.  We had to deal with a lot of last minute demands from our bosses, most notably of which was a Christmas "promotional activity" we had to prepare for at a middle school in Weifang (which was HUGE GINORMOUS it looked like a university on arrival).  After creating a swanky PowerPoint presentation that tells the kids what Christmas is all about (naughty and nice list, Santa and Mrs Claus living in the North Pole, Santa's Workshop, Rudolph, lump of coal, milk and cookies, blah blah blah) we were driven out into what looked like the middle of nowhere as it was painfully obvious from the new sites and smells: the nuclear powerplants that must supply the city with all the energy it uses were right nearby.  This is China for you.  Anyway, we gave our quick presentations and went door to door to each room, quizzing them on the things we talked about in exchange for prizes to the ones who answered correctly.  The kids loved it and I actually found the experience a reaffirmation of my ability to not only handle a room of 30 or 40 kids but also grab and keep their attention with my planned out presentation.  Being able to see an entire middle school's worth of grade 7 students is not something you get to do every day in Canada, that's for sure.  The kids were really sweet and they really got into the activity.
The downside of the whole excursion was that our bosses actually got lost on the cold, dark roads coming back from the school.  Pity, being it was Christmas eve and all and I had to get home really quick to leave my cookies and milk out for Santa.  To be honest, I wasn't really that bothered by being stuck in the car for about an hour in the traffic.  I mean, come on, it's Christmas eve in China, do you really think people aren't going out places to celebrate with friends or family?  My coworkers, however, were super irritated and I could understand why.  My boss can be a painfully slow driver.  I finally understood the whole picture, though, after we got out of the car.  Turns out there was a Christmas party happening that night.at the vice principal of the Canadian offshore high school.  I had only met him once before but he was a really nice guy and I decided to go out and have some fun for the holidays.  Inevitably, we all had an amazing time.  He ended up marrying a Chinese woman and had 2 kids together in China.  Their apartment was beautiful and their kids were the cutest little things ever.  After playing with the kids for the first half of the night, we sent them to bed and drank and got very merry (so to speak!)  We played and shared some music, made mulled wine, something I don't think I've ever had before but was totally delish, and talked about all things China and teaching related.  Mmmmm mulled wine!
We were going to order KFC when we got hungry but they stopped delivering at ten so instead some of us ended up going to our favourite bar after a while and we stayed up real late and then got McDonald's at like 4 in the morning.  A very western Christmas eve if you ask me!
Today I woke up feeling surprisingly zippy after a late night filled with alcohol and screeching Chinese kids.  Which was important, for I FINALLY administered my English exam to my 3 English listening classes today in the afternoon.  It was really quite a show getting 150 students to sit according to their student numbers, bring their bags to the front of the room, keeping them quiet, and trying to prevent cheating as much as possible (an impossible task, they all cheated but a Chinese woman of very high ranking in the uni caught two students cheating and ripped their papers up in anger!  I'm still not sure what to do with them since it is now up to me but I'm pretty sure I'll give them a zero).  It was really crazy, standing at the front of this huge auditorium, having all of these college students hanging on to my every word and syllable as I explained how the exam would work and proceeded to read the English passages I selected for them to answer questions about.  It's funny to be the big teacher here even though I'm still really a student back home.  It really allows me to understand what it's like for my university professors.
After the exam ended, the students immediately turned to look at each other's papers and copy answers.  Wrenching their papers away was just insane.  I could have reacted by simply tearing up more papers but I did not.  I have marked 1/4 of the exams tonight at Starbucks (because my power went out in my apartment this afternoon!) and most of them passed (so far).  At the college I work at, a 60% is the pass/fail mark, not 50 like it is in the west.  Most students got a mark of 62 or 64 so far so it's very tight but I think it's perfectly fair.  The highest mark I saw so far was 84% and the lowest was perhaps 50 something percent.  I'm feeling really happy knowing that I have a really good mark distribution like this, with most people doing ok and very few outliers.  It means my test was in fact fair and appropriate for their level and I don't think the cheating got too out of hand since I don't see any extremely good marks yet.
Thankfully, the power was back on when I came back from Starbucks so I'm just sitting here writing away before bed.  I wanted to attach some photos to this but their not coming through fast enough so I'll post them later on when they're finished.
Alrighty

The Most Ginormous Santa EVER!

It snowed last night, the last night of one of my coworker's time here in China so it was a very surreal and bittersweet day yesterday.  She had an open house at her apartment so my roommate and I went and took a lot of free things from her apartment, such as her toaster oven (SCORE!), shampoo, soap, Chinese-English flash cards, maps of Shanghai (that'll come in handy!) and more.  We all went out to the bar to celebrate our time together and see her off and it had been snowing all day.  It has also been a trying time in some ways since our bosses literally just told us today and yesterday about a number of Christmas events we are required to attend and organize so we are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to get things in order for our bosses and also keep on top of the UBC end of term assignments associated with the end of the work term.  Luckily I just finished that, but now I have more work to do, not to mention all the exams I'll have to mark next week.  Ugh.  But the snow is cheering us up.  Take a look at this!!

The snowy view from one of our windows in the apartment.

Walking through the snowy neighburhood.

You can see some of the escalators behind the Santa which will give you an idea of just how large he is!  

Laurel and I wearing our 3D glasses and being silly before Life of Pi begins.

MMMM I LOVE CHINESE POPCORN!  so sweet

Starbucks

What does a Starbucks in China look like?  Well really the point of this is to see if the webcam that came with my computer really works but I thought you might wonder what it really looks like... nothing special.  It's ... well, Starbucks.

December in China

December has been really busy here in Weifang.  I've been designing my final exams for my college classes.  I was informed very recently that I'm having an additional 19 students sit in on my exams who failed last semester.  Of course, I have no problem with this but I am unsure how they expect to pass my exam if they did not come to any of my classes this semester, especially if they did not pass last time around.  But we will see how they do.  I am mostly worried that I will have to take papers away from students if I see them cheating, which does not seem to be as big of a deal in China as it is back in the west.  My colleagues have been giving me dire warnings all semester that they have such headaches with cheating students, as well as the fact that the administration pushes them to pass students who should be failing.  I am really not sure how all of this will play out in the next few weeks but this is what things are building up to around here.  The weather here has been crisp and cold this month, a stark contrast to the rather mild weather we had earlier in November which saw temperatures sitting at around +3 degrees in the day time and around 0 at night.  Now temperatures are usually around -10 during the day and even colder at night so we really have to be careful when crossing the street and moving around.  It snowed here only once, really, and it didn't really stick.  Apparently it doesn't really snow here very much at all but it is still visible in some places which makes the holiday season feel a bit more festive.  I don't know why, but some of the photos did not attach properly to this post and I really wanted to show you a comedic, ginormous inflated Santa balloon that is seen hanging in one of the malls in our neighbourhood.  I don't think you would ever see something like this in the west but it is just HUGE.  I also wanted to post pictures from a little outing two nights ago, when myself and a few others went for dim sum and then saw a movie, Life of Pi, at a different mall.  That movie was AMAZING everyone should go see it!  It's magical.  Too bad social more around making noise in movie theaters are radically different in China than they are in the west.  We had to use our "teacher voices" to get a really disrespectful and obnoxious man to stop talking so loudly on his cell phone half the time.  I think most people were thankful those white folk were telling him to keep quiet.  I would go see that movie again, mostly because it is in 3D, but also because the ending of the story is so touching.  Internet in our apartment has not been working for the past several days which has really been a nuisance.  I really wanted to post some more articles to this blog but of course that hasn't happened because of it.  One of the other UBC co-op students is leaving in two days to go home back to Canada since her co-op term is finished, so we are all sad to see her go.  We will all be doing something together tonight and I think some holiday parties are in order (I am hearing of an "end-of-the-world" party on December 21st!  How creative!)  There's also a big dinner planned tomorrow for all the foreign teachers at Weifang University and everyone's going.  So everyone's really excited to be seeing the end of term coming up and the holidays approaching.  Of course, it has me feeling a tad homesick, knowing that all of my family is together in Whistler and skiing on fresh snow (fresh snow is not always so abundant in Whistler every December) from Facebook.  But we have also booked flights for our big February trip to Guilin so we are really excited about that.  I have posted some of the photos below so you can see what life is like for me in December in China.

The trees in our neighbourhood certainly look the part, don't they?  I remember all the leaves dropped in a span of about two days.

I got a haircut two days ago.  Wanted you all to see it!  I've been getting a few complements on it! 

Way before I got my haircut. I usually wear a toque in this cold weather.

This is at the Korean restaurant, Beautiful Ground, near the university, which is probably the most popular place for foreigners to meet for lunch.  Funny how it's only open for about 3 hours every day during lunch.  It's packed in there at noon so sometimes we can't get a table.  The tables and chairs are really cute and covered in painted images of flowers and hearts and they are so small for us tall foreigners but we love it there.  The food is delicious.  You'll see some of it in a second.

Ilya and I sometimes take crazy photos of ourselves. 

Ilya.

And Ilya again.

OK so this is a pretty dramatic image I came across in the downtown area of the city.  This abandoned structure has been an eyesore in the Tai Hua area of the city ever since I've been here 3, no about 4 months ago (I CAN'T BELIEVE IT HAS ALREADY BEEN THIS LONG!) Anyway, it's really nice to see them tearing it down.  That day it was really foggy in the city and everything looked really pretty and dramatic in the fog.  I think this was around the time it snowed.

Looking in the direction of that construction site, you can see downtown buildings emerging through the fog and a ginormous purple Christmas tree in the foreground.

In front of the construction there are large red blown up tube shaped balloons bent in a semicircle fashion to mark the entrance of the mall (which is to the left).

A foggy look into the university grounds.

This is one of my favourite meals in the cold winter months.  A bowl of boiling hot water with egg, tomato, and cilantro is perfect, along with those sandwichy looking things you may be wondering about.  Well those are actually a kind of savoury pastry or dough that is flaky and stuffed inside with Donkey meat, a hot kind of pepper, and a paste made with the fat and gravy of the meat and some other spices.  It is truly a delicious delicacy in China and I know I will miss it when I come home.

Ah here it is, the picture of the food I wanted to show you from the Korean place.  On the left is a bowl of spicy soup of some kind.  Hard to describe the taste, but it is truly a burning addiction in the winter.  It comes with some noodles, seeds, an egg, and veggies.  Since it's not enough for me for lunch, I also usually order the dish you see on the right, maybe it's a bit hard to see, but it's a Korean authentic dish made with rice, vegetables (carrots, cabbage, a kind of vegetable that's not bok choy but reminds of it, and a long kind of fungus.  There's also some sort of tasty really crunchy veg in there that has a head and is long and spindly and thick but I have no idea what it is and I have never seen it before).  There's a hot sauce poured over the whole thing, with nuts and seeds sprinkled on top, and then a raw egg cracked on top.  It's heated in an oven so that when it arrives at the table it's sizzling and piping hot.  You mix it all in so that the egg cooks on the hot steel dish it's cooked in and you get a really tasty meal.  Probably my favourite meal here.

About a week ago I was enjoying myself at home watching TV on my laptop (before the internet cut out) and I had a snack consisting of that imported cheese you probably heard me raving about on Facebook, Ritz crackers (also imported) and apple slices.  BAHAHA the funniest thing just happened, I am currently sitting in Starbucks, writing this (because, no internet at home) and there is a window next to me with a hallway on the other side leading to the mall.  A man was walking into the mall and just completely did a double-take and leaned down to get a good luck at me through the window (there's a poster in the way right at my eye level).  I've had looks but none quite as shocked as this man's face when I instinctively looked back at him.

This mesmerizing pattern caught my eye as I was walking home one day from one of my classes on the university grounds.

I'll post more of those photos I was telling you about later.  Bye for now!

The Next Adventure

Ok everyone GUESS WHAT'S HAPPENING?  My roommate and I have decided on where we are going to travel in China for our six weeks off!  We were spending a long time procrastinating on the big decision partly because China is such a huge country and it is hard to decide where one wants to go when there are so many options and each one seems just as viable as the next.  That being said, we knew we wanted to see Shanghai and Beijing right from the get-go.  Beijing practically worked itself out because we went with a group of teachers who are also from BC who teach at the Canadian international high school here in Weifang.  Even though we mostly did our own thing, just being able to kind of follow in their footsteps and knowing they were around was a big help.  Naturally, it felt overwhelming to plan out where to go and what to see all by ourselves.
Luckily, a Canadian co-op student who flew with us from Vancouver at the very beginning invited us to stay with her family in Shanghai (she has a Chinese background) for the Chinese new year.  This is a really incredible opportunity for us to see the new year celebrations from the perspective of a family in the city so we are really excited about that.  The new year is officially February 12th, 2013, so we are probably going to meet her in Shanghai on the 9th.  Since our six weeks off begins right in the middle of January, we'd like to leave Weifang sometime around then and head down south to Nanjing, a city not far from Shanghai.  This is a city with a lot of history, one of China's former capitals (the name of the city means "Capital of the south"). This a rather ginormous city so we are also strongly considering doing a separate trip to see this city at the beginning of January since we will only be working weekends from mid-December to the start of break and also because of the heavy crowds travelling around the country during the holidays.  There's a lot to do and see here, such as climbing the city wall of Nanjing, riding a cable car up Purple Mountain, and visiting many of the city's parks, bridges, temples, and ruins.
After that, we'll head to a city called Suzhou, another city of historical importance. This place has many of my coworkers sentimental over their previous experiences there.  One of them urged me to go there, explaining that it was the kind of place she had imagined a Chinese city to look like before coming to this country and not knowing what to expect.  She also said it was her favourite place (and she has been to many places around the mainland).  This is a city known for its natural and architectural beauty, well preserved since its ancient roots.  There are beautiful gardens and temples to see here and it even features the largest inner-city lake in all of China.  The lake can be seen pictured on 1 yuen bills.
After spending time with Catherine in Shanghai, we will meet another friend named Collin in a city called Guilin.  We decided to go here because Collin invited us to come travel with him during his holiday and he is a very well-seasoned traveler.  We would probably not end up taking on a trip to a place like this by ourselves but it is another excellent opportunity to see a different part of China knowing we will be with someone like him.  Guilin is a beautiful, rather small city located in the autonomous region of Guangxi toward the southernmost part of China (near Hong Kong).  It will likely require taking an overnight train to get there or we may even book a flight.  The area has very interesting geography, with ancient mountains that have been shaped into tall, slim looking bumps on the horizon by rivers and water movements over millions of years.  These processes have also formed some very extensive karst landscapes as well.  We are very excited to tour some of the areas surrounding Guilin and to see the landscapes up close and personal.  A view of the Li river with a Jung boats and mountains in the surrounding area can be seen pictured on the 20 yuen bill.
After spending up to a week there, we will probably be exhausted and will want to get home as soon as possible.  If time permits at the beginning of January, we are hoping to take a short trip to Qingdao (we still haven't gone yet!) because it's so cheap (apparently only 29 for the train and 40 a night at some hostels).
Getting super excited!

Dead Cows, Chinese Ikea, and Poetry

I should preface this post by warning readers that there is a potentially disturbing image posted at the bottom of this article.  As I am sure you have guessed by now from the title, it is of a dead cow.  Why are there dead cows in the middle of a mid-sized bustling city in China you might ask?   I was just as surprised as you were.  We were walking from our university offices to the Korean restaurant where we westerners usually go for lunch when we saw the gut wrenching image of a cow's head and part of it's carcass (mostly it's rib cage) hanging outside a shop that was brightly decorated with red paper and flowers.  A coworker explained to me that this was probably a new restaurant that had just opened and was attracting customers with the eye-catching display in front of it's doors.  From the direction in which we were approaching, I thought it very possible that the cow might have been fake, except then I saw the bucket placed carefully beneath it with blood dripping into it.  The cow's tongue looked sadly limp as it hung from the mouth of the creature.  On the other side you could see all kinds of insides of the creature's head.  I was surprised there were no flies or there was no smell.  Maybe they just put it out for a few hours before disposing of the thing.  Don't worry, you will be warned as you scroll down to prevent an unwanted view of the image and I took the photo from the least disgusting angle possible before scurrying away in fright.

As you may remember, I started working at a different training school about 5 weeks ago.  I made friends with a really nice coworker who spent five years in Canada (Victoria) so she speaks fluent English.  Sometimes she takes me on little outings between classes.  For example, one time we went to an imported food store nearby I did not know existed and I bought Ritz crackers.  She also took me to a proper bookstore (something I had not found yet) a few days ago and I bought a proper Chinese-English dictionary with Pinyin (English transliteration of the characters), a rare finding.  I even found a Chinese-English phrasebook with pinyin and a guide on grammar in the same book  What a find!  I also bought a nice large sized poster of a map of China to hang in the apartment.  Lastly, I FINALLY found a book on Chinese calligraphy with the exact same font I am learning (there are so many fonts one can learn) so this was really nice.  The following photos are of a little excursion we went on to a place she described as the Chinese version of Ikea.  There were things like beds and laundry baskets and decorative items for the house at this place.  Pricing ranged from the ultra cheap to expensive there.

Me being a goof.

I really liked this sculpture.  The Chinese love playing basketball.

This is the poem I am learning to draw in my calligraphy classes.  According to Guo Wei, my teacher, the poem is very famous and beautiful in it's simplicity.  You can tell that each line contains ten characters.  In fact, when you draw it on calligraphy paper, you need to draw the first five characters in a vertical line and then the next five parallel to the first and so on.  I am able to draw the second line you see in the picture (which is really two lines, five characters each) without much difficulty.  Now I am learning the first line so I should be able to bring home a poem of twenty characters on nice calligraphy paper.  So excited to finish my little project.  Maybe I can learn the last twenty characters too before I leave.  

The poem roughly translated to English means (assuming my memory is correct), "After the rain has finished, the mountain is empty.  The air is cool and there are no animals or people to be seen (line one).  The moonlight shines in the spaces between pine trees and the streams gush with water over the stones (line two).  The mountain is covered with a forest of pines and even though there is no one in sight, the sound of girl's laughter can be heard (line three).  The stream flows into the lake where the lotus plants grow high above the water, hiding the fishing boat from view except for a fishing line (line four).

Getting my grade 4 students to channel all their wild abundant energy into learning English was hard until I found a system that worked at least for me.  I divided them into teams of two and then each team would get a point if they could answer a question correctly.  Pairing the shy students with fast ones allow everyone to get a chance to be recognized.  Making up a creative team identity also helped as well (see the little drawings I made for each team.)  Finally, getting them to memorize English dialogues became a snap if I gave them prompts.  The team with the highest points at the end of class gets a sticker each and ten stickers gets you a prize from Canada (usually a Canadian key chain).

Okay, we have reached the end of the post.  Scroll below to see the picture of the dead cow.  Can't say I didn't warn you!