Today is my second day in China! And what an adventure it is! I am having trouble finding words to describe it here, except for that I love it! China is, in many ways, a very refreshing change from Canada. Particularly, the cost of living here. For example, taking a cab here is normal because it is pretty affordable. From my apartment across town to the downtown area costs about 13 quai. Taking the Chinese price and dividing it by seven gives you the Canadian equivalent, so that's less than $2 Canadian. A cab to the local Walmart in Weifang costs about $1 Canadian. Groceries here (we bought everything from towels to sponges to Tide, dish washing detergent, hangers, coffee, sugar, soy sauce, fruit and vegetables, chicken and more) was about 130 quai, which was about $20 Canadian!
The flight here wasn't bad at all. My roommate and I met at the airport and flew together, along with our other colleague who flew in from Calgary that morning. The three of us traveled to Beijing international airport and then waited for a few hours for a connecting flight to Qingdao (about an hour long flight) where representatives from the university we are working at picked us up and took us on a two hour drive to Weifang. The drive was kind of scary for me since the road was extremely foggy and the Chinese have (shall we put it nicely) different driving norms than we do in Canada. Luckily I was tired enough to sleep most of the way there.
When we got to our apartment, we climbed six flights of stairs to the top floor where we are living. There is no elevator. Suffice to say, I'm not worried about my exercise regiment while in China, elevators are not normal here and everything from my office to my apartment to most shopping experiences feature climbing at least five flights of stairs.
The apartment is lovely. A two-bedroom spacious suite, it has really lovely views of our little neighbourhood, with the architecturally unique Chinese buildings in view all around us, lots of greenery, trees and more. Walking around our area is really nice, there are lots of families and it seems like there's a real sense of community here. You can buy freshly baked "buns" (hard to describe, but delicious morsels of dough stuffed with an array of vegetables or meats) for breakfast in the morning. There's a bank at virtually every street corner. You can always find places to buy water or Ramen noodles if you are desperate. (The heat here can be unbearable at times. It is around 33 every day with very high humidity. This explains why Chinese food is quite high in salt- you are sweating a lot, all the time in summer).
The walk from my apartment to the university is probably about ten minutes and it's absolutely beautiful. The entrance to the campus is framed by a symmetrical stunning group of gated structures, a well manicured garden and high trees. Behind this is a giant boulder with the words "Weifang University" plated in gold writing. As you walk further, yous see a huge red artsy kind of structure rising high above you and then a huge building behind that (I think that's the library). Turn left, and you see a road that's surrounded by maple trees. Follow that for about two minutes and on your right you see a big area filled with tennis courts and basketball courts. A little further and then you turn right and you see a gigantic courtyard surrounded on all sounds by a big building (I know that's kind of general but you kind of feel you're at the bottom of that hole in the new batman movie...)
The staff office is in there and I'll be teaching university classes in there too. Apparently the elementary school is in a different part of town and I'll be teaching some kids as well.
I'll post pictures of all this soon.
Pizza Hut, KFC, and other western food is common here. There's an H&M somewhere around the Starbucks I'm sitting in too. The standard of living here is just as high as it is back home in Canada.
I'm trying to learn the language, but it's hard to memorize the combination of tones and sounds required for all the different things I want to learn to say. Slowly but surely. If you get the word right but the tone wrong, you could be saying something completely different (hence the title of this post for us English speakers who want to get a feel for what I mean). Also, the dialect in Weifang is different than in other parts of China. Apparently you need to switch all the "r" sounds for "n's". Maybe it's the other way around. Too much to remember. So far, the most useful thing to know is how to say thank you (Xie Xie). I sit silently as my roommate, a linguistics major at UBC who is learning Mandarin at an exponentially faster rate than I am, tells cab drivers where we want to go. When he's done, I get him to teach me everything he just said and I try to retain it, but it's hard. I find myself repeating the phrase a hundred times only to forget it a few minutes later. When we get out of our cab, I say thank you in Mandarin and the cab driver perks up and says "you're welcome" in Mandarin and shakes my hand. They all must be thinking that I know Mandarin because I pull off the accent really well. But I've learned other phrases too, like "I want this" (ordering food) or "Weifang University, South Gate" for telling cab drivers where I want to go, or the word for "mall" (which won't get you anywhere because they don't know which mall to take you to so you need to learn the individual name for each mall location you want to go to).
Yesterday, George (one of my employers) took the three of us and the other foreign workers to a restaurant for lunch. Pretty sure I tried some kind of a piranha fish (they were kind of small and had what looked like very sharp teeth). The food here is really quite delicious, although I can taste the high amount of pig fat they use to cook it with (not ideal). Later, we met up with more foreigners and about 12 of us sat in a groovy restaurant in the downtown area outside enjoying eggplant skewers, chicken skewers, and pretty much everything-skewers. We also had fried bread. You guessed it, they were also skewered. Everything was tasty. I love taro root and my favourite thing is some kind of spicy, chili flavoured string bean (very different kind of beans than we have in Canada, closer to edamame here).
After dinner, they took us to a really hip bar somewhere else where I don't know because it's impossible to find unless you know where it is. I think it was called "The Backyard" (maybe since you had to go through what looked like a dark creepy alleyway to get to). The front of the bar had a sign in English that said "Only ass parkers permitted" and inside the bar was a Canadian flag, several white guys, several black guys, a lot of Belgium beer, some giggly young looking Chinese girls, a very long table filled with our cohorts from dinner, all beckoning us to sit down and relax, and very friendly English speaking Chinese staff who looked like they had listened to the Beatles many, many times in their lives. I ordered some Belgium light beer which was quite tasty and enjoyed the music and the conversation (Chromeo, Michael Jackson, and everything from teaching to stories about attaining free beers at other bars in the city for being the token white people there. The latter music selection was at my request, thankfully).
There is no internet in our apartment yet, but there will be soon (hopefully) as George has just sent me an email about setting it up tonight (praise the internet lords!) Thankfully, my UBC VPN network works great and I can get all the usual sites I want without dealing with the whole censorship thing.
We've heard about lots of cool places to go on the weekends/days off, most notably a mountain whose name I can't remember now where you climb an estimated 10,000 steep stairs to get to the top. You can stay at a cheap accommodation at the top and apparently there's lots to see there (temples, shrines, etc). I think it's in Qingdao.
I want to go Hunan, Xi'en (Terracotta warriors), Beijing, the Great Wall, and Shanghai while I'm here. Apparently our colleague's father has an apartment in the heart of Shanghai and she's invited us to go with her there, something I'm very excited to do. Hong Kong doesn't look like an option for us since you need another visa to exit the mainland.
It is very easy to get around here. I've heard it's about a 4 hour train to Beijing, a 1 hour train to Qingdao, and the cost of the latter is only about 60 quai (about 9 bucks Canadian!)
I'm still a little jet-lagged but we've had lots of opportunity to rest up and I'm already feeling accustomed to the time change. Lots of quirky things I like about China. Most notably the signs (for example, we all laughed at the announcement in the train in the Beijing airport that told us to "please, collect your belongings and get off the train" once we got to our stop. We would never hear something so blunt in friendly Canada.)
Anyway, I'm running out of things to talk about and I think that means it's about time for me to wrap up this post.
I'll post lots of photos soon :)
-Avi
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