Fireworks

So I expected to hear a lot of noise pollution from the car horn. There's some, don't get me wrong and I will definitely describe this soon, but nothing compared to the firework. The Chinese LOVE their fireworks - as they should - they developed this technology back during the Tang dynasty (between 589-907AD). The Chinese used this technology to blow things up and make pretty designs in the sky, the Mongolians took this same technology (aka: gunpowder) and used it to conquer the Chinese! Hmmm. So 1500 years later, the Chinese still love their fireworks. They go off every day, literally every day. They go off in the morning, mid-day and especially at night. When we first arrived, we though they were doing demolition at 7 in the morning, turns out, people are just really excited to set off their fireworks. They set them off in the courtyard of our apartment complex, at the hotel across the street and then off in the distance. We're not sure why they set them off - maybe because it's 10am on a Thursday or lunch time "yay fireworks" - because you can see them so well when it's light outside?!?! Um are you confused yet, because we are. We've been able to determine why fireworks went off on 2 occasions out of the hundreds we've heard. One was because a nightclub was opening just down the street another was because of a conference at a hotel. The thing we find the most puzzling is that fireworks are expensive, so why are they being shot off morning, noon and night? Aaron is so frustrated with them at this point. It drives him nuts. I don't particularly mind them. So just another one of the weird quirks of China!

Free Falling!!!

So I was going to write about fireworks, but that's going to have to wait, because in my opinion this is so much better.

I received a call from our landlady this morning telling me that I need to be home this afternoon because there are men coming by to fix the windows. 1.Thanks for asking if this works with my schedule (which it didn't really) and 2. Aaron and I still hadn't been able to figure out what is wrong with the windows in the first place. A man came by for a reconnaissance visit a few weeks ago, but I had no idea what he was looking for and he just babbled away in Chinese to me, wandering around the apartment and looking at the windows while I just stared at him thinking I wish I knew what you were saying, but I just don't.

So I get a knock on the door this afternoon to find 2 men getting together a pail with what looks like cement. This should be interesting because our windows are metal framed and sliding glass so I have no idea how cement is going to help. So I let them in and when you have workers in your apartment I've learned, you leave the front door open (which I kind of like from a safety standpoint.) So I watch one of them unraveling his harness which is good, except he only has the top half and not the bottom of a full body harness. Given an option, I'll take the bottom any day of the week, because when you only have the top and you fall, you are going to fall right out of it! Then I see this rope with a carabiner. Again good, but what exactly is he going to hook on to? I look out these windows every day (it's how I check the weather) and I've never seen any hooks jutting out of the side of the building for him to clip on to and these windows certainly aren't going to stay in if he falls (see how much I trust the Chinese construction!) So the one guy puts on his harness, hands the rope with the carabiner to his friend then climbs out the window. What??? Are you insane? We're on the 22nd floor and you're dangling/standing on the window ledge out the window with nothing to support you, but the hope that your friend is bracing himself the entire time you're hanging out the window plus that if you do fall, he's not going to come flying out the window with you! All I can say is "China!"

Fortunately for all of you who missed this fascinating sight I took some pictures :) Please note that in the first one, the guy holding the rope, is using one of his hands to gesture with so he's only holding onto the rope with ONE hand!!





As it turns out, the pail didn't have cement, but rather some kind of sealant. They kindly showed me what was wrong and I discovered that water is damaging the wall underneath the window. So either water is leaking in at the base of the window or just the whole wall is leaking. So he used his sealant to paint the outside window ledge. We'll see if it works. Personally I'm a little skeptical!

School Life

So, everyone keeps asking how school is going. I have a class of 5 students. It's the 6/7 year old class, which means that I have four first graders and one second grader. This is actually more difficult to do that you might think. A lot of the curriculum overlaps, but sometimes it doesn't AT ALL. In this case, I am not sure what I'm going to do. I'll figure it out, of course, but in the mean-time it is a source of stress.

The day itself goes like this:
Assembly first (whole school, which is 20 kids or so)
Reading
Language Arts (writing skills)
Math
Science or History


After that, the schedule changes based on the day. The kids also have Chinese every day. But they will also have PE, Library, Music, Technology (with me), or ELD (which stands for English Language Development).

A note about ELD. It's basically when we do silent reading and work on phonics, handwriting, and spelling.

I am also teaching the chess/go club on Wednesdays which is nice because the kids mostly know how to play. I have kids of every age in this club. The Kindergardeners play Chinese checkers, which is easy to play and seems to keep them occupied. I originally wanted it to be a chess/checkers club, but I can't find a checkers set here to save my life.

I also am teaching technology to the entire school. We are using a program called "Techknowledge" for most of the kids. It goes through learning the microsoft office suite, as well as keyboarding. I don't agree with some of the curriculum, especially the part where 5 year olds need to be practicing typing for 10 minutes every class. There has been research that typing at such a young age can actually be detrimental.

The kids across the grades are pretty good. I have the most trouble with the 13 year old class because they seem apathetic and uninterested in participating in discussions, which is essentially what a class of 3 kids is. A discussion class.

The school itself is really nice in that I get to work so much with each child. I have gotten to know my kids well already and can gauge their strengths and weaknesses. I also have the time to go back an re-teach as needed. I don't know if I will be able to go back to a standard public school classroom after this experience. I am sad that in order to get through the material, so many kids have to either fall through the cracks and be left behind (the underachievers) or be constantly bored (the overachievers). We will just have to see what happens. I'll let you know how it all goes.

Gainfully unemployed :)

Everyone keeps asking me if I'm working. No, I'm not. I've spent A LOT of time looking, but am not optimistic anything will pan out at this point. I'd say 90% of the job postings I find require you to be fluent in Chinese, which I'm not. My Chinese right now is useless vocab I'm learning through Rosetta Stone and "hello," "how much," "thank you" and "goodbye." Plus, the vacations I would have through these jobs would not line up at all with Aaron's and he gets about 5 weeks off during the school year. Since one of the things we'd like to do is travel, it does put a damper on things. I also don't have a work visa and most of the jobs I'm looking at want you to already have that. I had an interview for a teaching position at a University that went well. The downside is it would be a 2 hour commute each way on top of an 8 hour work day, for the equivalent of $1000 a month. I said no.

So I'd like to tutor and in the meantime I'm doing a lot of adventurous cooking - coconut chicken curry, stocks, fried chicken - so if you have any suggestions let me know, but we don't have an oven - only a small toaster oven. I'm going to start taking Chinese classes on a regular basis. I'm looking into various schools right now, a lot of them offer a first lesson/demo free option, so I'm going to shop around before I commit to anything. I go grocery shopping (which is at least a 1 1/2 hour trip) a few times a week, I look for jobs online, try to post things to the blog and am wanting to improve my photography skills. I'm taking violin - the principal at Aaron's school teaches violin. All I have to do is buy a violin ($40) and show up to the middle school class along with 2 of the other teachers who have decided to crash it as well. So that's pretty much it. So that's my life right now.

Birthday dinner for 10???

Um, no just 2 thanks!

Aaron asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday and I said that I wanted to go to a good/nice Chinese restaurant. (It didn't have to be fancy, but mainly just good.) So we decided to go to this Cantonese restaurant that we had read good reviews about online. We studied the map, found where we needed to go and boarded the bus with all the peasants. We guessed at the Chinese characters correctly and managed to get off at the right stop and then walked about 15-20 minutes until we got to the restaurant. As we walked past the restaurant to go inside I saw some people eating through the window, but didn't notice their surroundings much. We walked up to the hostess stand and told her a table for 2 and we followed her to our table. Now this isn't your typical layout for a restaurant. At the main entrance there's a hostess stand, but it opens up into a courtyard. The people we saw eating were in the building to the right. She took us halfway down the courtyard to the building on the left, up one flight of stairs and then we curved a bit around on the upstairs outside walkway. She stopped outside of a door, opened the door then turned on the lights and the A/C and we looked inside to see that we have our own private dining room with a table set for 10.



Hmmmmmm. Not quite what we expected.

Aaron and I looked at each other puzzled. We reflected back on our "conversation" with our hostess and then it came back to us. After we stood there and held up our hands indicating 2 she then spoke to us in Chinese and we responded by nodding our heads and saying "two." Well, I guess somehow that translated into "private room for 10!"

So what's wrong with being treated like royalty by having our own private room??? So we embraced our rise to power and admired our surroundings. It turned out the room was quite nicely equipped with a flat screen tv, a "sitting area" with some very uncomfortable looking chairs, our own private toilet and our very own waitress! She did her job well standing off to the side in the corner of the room waiting, just to make sure that at any given moment we didn't need anything. We think that these rooms are mainly used by people having a party and are there for several hours. They sit around the table, smoke, drink, watch tv. When someone's had too much to drink, he can start to sleep it off on the "sofa" (it's really a hard wooden bench with a very thin cushion.)



We were definitely the main attraction as far as the staff was concerned because various cooks, cleaning ladies and other waitresses kept walking by to peek in the window at us. At one point we had about 6 different staff members in our room, ranging from a woman in a business suit to a cleaning lady - none of them were talking to us, they were just trying to look busy and like they "needed" to be there. It was really amusing.

We enjoyed ourselves, despite being slightly overwhelmed. The food was excellent and we discovered that chilled aloe is quite tasty. We also had a saute with white fish, colored peppers, mango and pear; fried rice and then this not so good filo pastry thing (which we won't get again.)

So as we're walking through the courtyard to leave I look at that building on the right (where I had seen the gentlemen eating on our way in) to see if they are also private dining rooms - oh no - it's a big public dining room, with many tables just for 2!!!!

Life In China

So Aaron is probably going to give you the male cut and dry version of how things are going and I'm going to do my best to tell you how we're doing. So hello and enjoy our adventure with us!

The best question is where to start. Well, we're living in the city of Suzhou. It's about a 40 min train ride west of Shanghai (which we plan to verify and check out on Saturday.) 6 million people live here, of which 20,000 are expats. Now I've had to re-adjust my thinking to the word "expat" - this includes everyone in the world, all nationalities, who is not a Chinese person - including all the Chinese who have changed their citizenship to Canada or Australia. One of the funniest things for me is to ask a Chinese person if they're from Suzhou and they say "No, I'm from Canada." What??? You're not Canadian, you can barely speak English let alone French! I think it's even stranger that they've immigrated to Canada (Australia tends to be the other popular one), changed their citizenship, clearly worked there for a while and then moved back to China. Why go through all that effort and then move back to China - I doubt I will ever understand. There are a lot of expats from South Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia. Bosch has a factory here and has brought a lot of Germans with them. The church we've been going to has representation from 24 different countries. It's quite amazing really. So those are the demographics.

Where we live is out in the middle of nowhere. This is a map I found on another bloggers website who's been living in Suzhou for several years. http://www.thehumanaught.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/suzhou-district-map.jpg We're in the orange blob at the top - Xiangcheng district. The old and interesting part of Suzhou is that dark blue small square in the middle. This is your typical Chinese architecture, narrow tree lined streets, street vendors, small pockets of markets every few blocks and then the gardens that Suzhou is known for. To the right (the green) is called SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park). It's about 15 years old and I think this is where most of the white expats live. If we want Western food, there's a grocery store in this area that we go to as well as a lot of international restaurants - I think there are 3 Mexican, there's a German type pub, a Sushi place, Indian and some others. It's about a 20 min taxi ride from our place. To the west of old Suzhou is SND (Suzhou New District) - it's in yellow. We haven't been there yet. This is where most of the expats use to live, but since SIP has been developed it's now mainly where Japanese and Korean expats live. A lot of the more established international schools are in this area. So SIP and where we live are areas with wide roads, high rise apartment buildings and then townhouses. There's really nothing interesting to look at. It's very sterile, boring and uninteresting. Fortunately, I found a bus that stops right outside our front door and takes us right into the center of the old city. It takes about 30 min and costs the equivalent of 30 cents. So we're pretty excited about that. I'm adding a picture here of the view from our apartment. We're not quite sure how far we can see, but easily 5 miles, if not longer. I'm also adding a picture of the old part of Suzhou.

So housing. Suzhou is a very wealthy city by Chinese standards. I think it's because of all the industries here, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. There are factories for Samsung, Bosch, Kraft, L'oreal and a whole bunch of others I didn't recognize. We don't tend to see a lot of really poor housing, although it definitely exists here. From what we can tell, most of it is newer apartment buildings. We do see some very sad homes, people doing laundry in the algae covered ponds or the sulfur smelling canal. This area is very humid, a bit worse than say the Virginia/DC area, and we've been really impressed with how many homes have A/C. From what we can tell these A/C units also double as heaters. So we are pleased that a fair amount of the people here have decent living conditions.

Rent or Buy?

One thing we will never do is buy an apartment or house in China. So when you buy an apartment or townhouse it comes with concrete walls and floors. It is up to you to provide the hard wood flooring, carpet, drywall, paint, toilet, shower, kitchen, etc. This is nice and all if you want to live there, you have free reign. If you want to rent your apartment, this is also nice because you don't have to worry about fixing it up and modeling. The renter does that. And should you decide to try and make your apartment more marketable by providing these elements to your house, no one will rent it, because while the layout is nice, they don't like the floors you picked! What??? Why as a renter am I going to shell out all this cash to renovate someone else's apartment. What financial benefit do I get? We have no idea. Apparently a woman at one of the other schools decided to buy an apartment and live in it while she was teaching in China. She has been trying to sell it for 2 years, because no one likes the way she renovated it!! Crazy.