Hmmm...

So things sometimes...or should I say frequently...don't work the way you expect them to in China. Last night I was going in and out of my kitchen and when I turned on the light I heard a crackling type sound. I looked up at the light and didn't see anything odd so I ignored it. But this morning when I woke up I looked up at the kitchen light and discovered that the lightbulb had melted through the plastic covering/light fixture thing. Whaaaat. Literally the lightbulb is half in and half out of the light fixture with melted plastic on it. Not sure exactly how that happened (I wasn't using the light for any abnormally long period of time yesterday that I know of)...but I think I'd better replace it. Time to call the Waiban!

And I'm Back!

So I’ve been inexcusably MIA for a few months now with no blog updates. But my belated new year’s resolution (along with many others) will be to write once a week something, anything, so you have something to read when you’re bored. Ha, most likely everyone has stopped looking at this blog so I’ll be writing in vain…but anyways. I actually have internet in my apartment so I should be updating quite frequently…but in reality I am spending a lot of internet time stalking people on Facebook and that just doesn’t leave me enough time to blog I guess. Somehow being in China seems like less of an adventure than Bolivia. Maybe to others China is a very foreign place, but to me it kind of feels like home being that I spent a summer in Shanghai and have been to Taiwan numerous times in the past couple of years (hmm…yes, that last point…well let’s just say based on the vicinity to China it seems not as out there).

I have to warn you though that these blog entries will probably be less well-thought out (you’re thinking…as if they were deeply insightful before?) since I’ll just post as I go instead of spending hours on my laptop without internet connection re-reading to make sure I got most of the grammar correct and didn’t reveal too many obscene details of my boring life :) Strangely enough, the reason I was inspired to write now, after all these months, is that last night I had a scary bug incident and it made me think of my time in Bolivia in my first house when I got acquainted with a few scorpions and the big scary bug that when it splattered it made a big mess. I saw a cockroach last night and so I got out the trusty Raid and sprayed it. And sprayed the area around the kitchen and bathroom. And then came back a few hours later and saw a bunch of semi-dead cockroaches squirming around. And then woke up this morning to 5 cockroaches of different sizes scattered around my apartment in the dying stages. Two of them were even encroaching on my bedroom territory (I think they were disoriented and got lost in their search for food). I did some research online and they said to flush them down the toilet so that’s what I did. But I wonder if spraying that spray and the scent of dead cockroaches attracted more to my apartment. Hopefully not or I’ll have to figure out how to say boric acid in Chinese to really deal with them (supp the most effective way to deal with them). Anyways, I think that cockroaches are really gross…definitely worse than the other bugs I encountered in Bolivia…I’d actually take scorpions over cockroaches. I think my fear of them is how fast they scurry around and they could scurry right up and onto me. But I guess if it came down to mice or cockroaches I’d have to think about it a little more. The annoying thing is that I don’t really keep food in my apartment so I’m wondering why they come here (maybe just to get a drink when they are thirsty). Everything I have is pretty much in plastic packages, I never leave dirty dishes in the sink, and the only things I “cook” in my apartment are ramen and oatmeal. Oh well. I think I need to get over my fear of cockroaches…I literally could not fall asleep last night because I pictured them coming into my room and crawling all over the place. Ick ick ick. Wah mommy wah.

Since I last posted I have gotten well-adjusted (习惯了!) to Panzhihua and celebrated my first Chinese Christmas, New Year’s with shaokao and a bunch of students, went to Chengdu for IST (3 days of training with other volunteers), went to Taiwan for 3 weeks for Spring Festival to hang out with the relatives and my mommy, and most recently gone up to Chengdu to see Kelley who flew in from London. Yup, that was my last two months. Now I have one week before classes start up so I’m busy planning and syllabus writing, etc. along with studying for the GMAT daily since I registered to take the exam in Chengdu on April 9th.

I also became extremely lazy in the past few months and stopped running completely…but then just tried to start a few days ago. 2 miles on the track and I’m sore! Lame. And if you ever didn’t know what muscles you use when you run, I have to say the most sore are the abductors and adductors (weird, you would think quads, hamstrings or calves, but no). Anyways, that’s another one of my things for this semester. So I’m working on being a good teacher of English, learning Chinese, studying for the GMAT, and not being a 胖子 (pang zi – aka fatty!). Which reminds me…one of the tastiest meals in Taiwan was at a little fast food joint called 周胖子饺子…some sesame noodles, dumplings, 凉菜 (a 1000 yr old egg that was actually tasty!).

Okay, that should whet your apetite (har har, no pun intended) for posts to come. Apologies if you wanted to hear about TEFL in China…I haven’t started working yet so I have nothing to talk about…maybe next week :)

PC China Top 5

So I've always been a person that is big on personal development and work-life balance...and after 2 weeks in Panzhihua I have come up with my official list of goals for my free time while I am here. I hope to spend the majority of my time that is not spent in class doing these activities (or combining the activities with hanging out with students and helping them practice their English). I'm finally giving up on my dreams of playing guitar (yeah, if it hasn't happened by now it's probably not going to) and focusing on a few things that I already have some interest in.

1. Chinese - Self-explanatory. It's one of my main personal reasons for being here and a lifelong (well, since college...what was I doing slacking off in Chinese School all those years...) goal of mine.

2. Badminton - A very popular sport that I used to love dearly in high school. So much so that I used to skip other classes to attend gym classes so I could play more. I don't want to play the backyard laid-back version...I want to play the as-seen-on-TV, birdies whizzing by, hardcore, diving all over the place, competitive version. I played 2 hours today and I can tell my arm is going to be very sore tomorrow.

3. Ping-Pong - Another national hobby. There's no lack of people to practice with and with the skill that they have, there's no choice but to improve.

4. Chinese Chess - Trying to re-learn a game that I used to play as a child. It'll probably be good exercise for the brain.

5. Mahjong - Who doesn't want to be one of those expert mahjong players? I want to be able to say I play, not just I know how to play. Maybe I'll even get a chance to play with my dad then.

As you can see, most of these hobbies are very Chinese...I am following the advice of one of Claire's students -- "when in China, do as the Chinese do." I find myself feeling very American some days, but I figure I can also discover my inner Chinese soul also during my time here.

Panzhihua Observations

1) I am going to have some killer legs when I leave this place. The city is nestled among the mountains and there are some steep climbs to get anywhere – including from my apartment to the classrooms and campus.

2) Bubble tea exists! I stumbled across a shop in my wanderings and the bubble tea shop (aka Jack Hut Fresh Drink) will probably be a regular stop for me on my trips into town.

3) I had my first cockroach sighting in my apartment yesterday. Today I bought my first can of cockroach killer. I don’t so much mind dead cockroaches, but I am not fond of the live scurrying variety. And although I had some issues with bugs when I first got to my site in Bolivia, I actually would prefer scorpion infestations to cockroach infestations…the natural countryside bug vs. city dirty bug argument. I’m just very squeamish.

4) Wang Ke Long. It’s like Carrefour where you can buy anything from appliances to apples. I went there today to buy some household supplies and was attacked by the random salespeople on all sides. I think they enjoyed helping me because I actually bought their ridiculous fancy things after they convincingly gave me their best pitches and product demonstrations. 150 kuai wet/dry mop anyone? I also happened to checkout behind the guy that was buying the 3 plastic bags (as in shopping grocery bags, not small produce bags) of pig fat. No, these were not sealed bags, they were grocery bags that had been shoveled full of pig fat and tied at the top with the fat oozing and spilling out the top. No doubt, pig fat ending up on the cashiers’ hands and the handle of the broom that I bought. Lovely.

Panzhihua University

Here's the English website. Yes, we are so advanced we have an English website!

http://www.panzhihua-university.com/

Check out the photos under "The University" - "Pictoral"...

"So cute! Like an apple!"

Although I’ve always fancied that I am a kumquat in the game of “if you were a fruit, what fruit would you be?” apparently I evoke responses of cuteness and apple-ness as well. That was the first remark I got when I was introduced to the medical assistant in the PC office here.

Yes indeed, I’m finally in China after a month and a half of slacking in the States. I spent one week in Chengdu for training and then took a 12 hr overnight train to arrive in Panzhihua, my site, this morning. It’s been an interesting experience so far. I can already see that the challenges of PC China (or shall we say U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers) are totally different from what we had in PC Bolivia. I am living in a city of 1 million people in southern Sichuan province, I have a washing machine and internet access in my massive apartment, and I have what appears to be a real job here as a university teacher. I blend in better than any other volunteer (it puts my sunglasses Bolivian disguise to shame) and am more likely mistaken for being mentally handicapped based on my level of Mandarin and blank looks following questions in Sichuan dialect rather than applauded for my feeble Spanish and Quechua. But there are some threads that tie my experience in Bolivia to what I see here. We’re still fulfilling the 3 Peace Corps’ goals of providing skilled people where they are needed and cultural exchange…and even the mountains surrounding Panzhihua make me think of las montañas del Valle Alto. So far, I’m very hopeful about what my experience can be here though. I spent a lot of my time in the States feeling guilty for not accomplishing what I had hoped to during my time in Bolivia and the choice I made to leave what I had started in Bolivia to go halfway around the world and start over in a move that can only really be called selfish. Finally arriving in China has helped me to move on and think about the future though. When I finish my work with Peace Corps, I will have spent more time in China than Bolivia and will hopefully have a better mastery of Chinese than Spanish. I hope that I will help students improve their English to the best of their abilities and that I will learn how to teach in the process. I have high hopes for my language skills and dreams of HSK success, but those are tempered by the fact that in contrast to where Spanish was critical for my work in Bolivia, Chinese is not especially necessary in being a successful teacher. Also, I will be teaching English majors who have blown me away in the classes that I observed with their huge vocabularies and overall knowledge beyond any English students that I encountered in Bolivia. It seems as if what they really need is just to practice all the knowledge that they have stored in their impressive memories and my job is to make sure that what they can read and write can be used in practical oral speech as well.

I’m actually not going to be teaching for a few months though…since I don’t have any formal classroom teaching experience (minus 10 student classes with Literacy Volunteers), I’m going to be spending the next two months observing classes and planning for next semester. Then we’ll all go on the long break for Chinese New Year and then I will start anew in February with a new class of students (hopefully having blazing success!). There are two other foreign teachers here, Claire, another PCV who has been here since Fall 2007, and Michael, a friend of another PCV that is in Panzhihua at another university. Other than us 4 Americans though, the expat community is pretty much nonexistent (this contrasts greatly with the concentration in Chengdu and Chongqing). We’re also pretty isolated from other volunteers which is a double-edged sword (hah, gotta start practicing those idioms so I can teach them to my students, did I even use that right? maybe I should call it a mixed blessing). It probably helps us integrate better into Chinese culture and concentrate more on the language without the distraction of going out with volunteers and expats every weekend, but getting to hang out with other volunteers is half the PC experience and we’re really too far away to even get together with others during weekends when there are holidays. Plus it stinks that I got to know some of the volunteers in Chengdu but it’s possible I might only see them once more before they finish their service since they are all in the group that came in 2007. Some of the more memorable experiences during my time in Chengdu were my first Sichuan hot pot and shaokao along with karaoke and getting to see the other volunteers teach as well as their secondary projects. I got to observe an English language singing contest that is held annually at one of the schools (one girl even sang Tori Amos and it was freaking awesome), a hip hop class that one of the volunteers teaches, and a lecture on American food that culminated in a sandwich making contest. The best part probably being the cute little Chinese students that did not know that mustard and peanut butter probably are not the best combination which resulted in their classmates that were the judges running out of the room to spit out the atrocious combinations that they were forced to try. Something tells me that those students do not have a very good impression of the American sandwich. Jelly and red onion anyone? I also had a lot of laughs from the English names chosen by students (and teachers!)…I met a teacher named Tomato and there were students with colorful names such as Moon, Jujubur, Fish, Lantern, and Auntie. Yes, there are fun times to be had in China!

Alegría en China

So after a lengthy process and the most stressful week of my life, Alegría en Bolivia is no longer. I will be transferring to Peace Corps in China to teach university-level English for 2 years (pending medical clearance and visa). First I will be coming back to the States for a visit while I wait for my clearance...which could take anywhere from a few weeks to a month or so and then off to China (among the possibilities are Sichuan, Guizhou, Chongqing, and Gansu). I'll be doing 2 weeks of training/orientation in Chengdu and then be off to my site...which apparently will have a minimum population of 200,000 people. Goodbye rural Bolivia, hello urban China. I'm REALLY excited about the opportunity to FINALLY learn Mandarin at an acceptable level and just as excited to be getting a more structured job AND to teach English as my main job. Apparently every cloud has a silver lining.

Dear Bolivia - I will miss you A LOT. But it's not "adios," it's more of an "hasta luego" or "tinkunakama" because I know in my heart that I will be back. Te cuida bien y te amo.