Singing and Dancing

By Kevin

“Man, the ... party is fierce,” Wes said with a grin as we left the karaoke bar.

We rode home, astonished at what we just took part in.

“That was just bizarre,” he repeated, as we got out of the taxi returning home. “You had 40 and 50 year old professionals, most of whom are members of the party. That was somethin' else.”

"It was fun," Christina said. "Thanks for coming with me."

Just after noon, the foreign affairs official (FAO) told us that there would be a banquet tonight.

When we got there, the dean of the English department told us, in English, that the banquet was being held in honor of teacher's day and Mid-Autumn festival, which are both coming up in the next couple weeks.

We enjoyed an array of delicious dishes and met several teachers and deans in the department, most of whom seemed genuinely excited to meet us. We learned that the dean at one point in time spent a year in Florida as part of a teacher exchange. We also discovered that one of the teachers in the department is about to go to Cuba to learn Spanish. The school hopes to begin offering Spanish classes. “But that plan might be a bit ambitious,” she confided to us after saying that “Espanol” is the only Spanish word she knew. We tripled her vocabulary, adding “hola” and “adios.”

After the banquet, we were invited for "singing and dancing" at a nearby karaoke bar.

Initially, we turned down the offer because we wanted to go downtown for ice cream and to explore the square, which Christina said is fun at night. But Christina felt a tug on her heart. “Do you think we should go?” she asked. “They've never invited us to do anything like this before. Maybe we should go. Show our solidarity...We don't have to stay long.”

By the time we got halfway across the street, we were hedging on the ice cream. By the time we made it across the street, guilt had set in. So we turned back.

“We changed our minds,” we told a couple teachers.

When we entered, the other teachers greeted us warmly and hurriedly escorted us to a table. One teacher was already singing a famous Chinese pop song. When she sat down, Wes decided to dive in, to the delight of the 20 teachers and deans who came to the afterparty. Wes sang a popular Chinese song, and several teachers gleefully sang along with him. Later, the dean asked Christina to a slow dance in the middle of the dance floor, twirling her around a couple times before the song was over.

The FAO then brought a long list of karaoke songs for Ruth and I to sing. All the pages but one were in Chinese. But the one page of English songs wasn't much help. The best prospects for Ruth and I to sing in the list of 20-plus-year-old hits seemed to be “Yesterday Once More,” “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Not exactly high on our list. They said we could chose something else if we wanted and they would search for it. We settled on the Titanic hit, “My Heart Will Go On,” figuring that our foreignness would outweigh my partial tonedeafness (I can hear the right notes, just can't always produce them well unless I'm singing in a group). Again, teachers sang with us and applauded loudly at the finish.

Since we'd done our duty, we made an exit plan: one or two more songs. But the dean of the department had other plans, pleading for us to stay for one more song.

As a dancing baby came onto the screen, he raised his arms to the roof to a driving dance beat and dragged us into the middle of the room. We found out why he didn't want us to leave just yet: this was a "singing AND dancing party."

Thankfully, we weren't the only ones. A dozen teachers, most in their 30s, 40s and 50s, grabbed hands and made a throbbing circle, swinging arms back and forth stepping forward and back with the beat. Before long they pulled Wes into the center, prompting him to strut his stuff, to the delight of everyone. Within the next several sweaty minutes, each of us had been pulled into the middle to spin around and shake our hips like crazy people. They did the same with the Chinese teachers. It was odd, but kinda fun.

Like Christina said, it was a good chance to bond a little both as a team and with the other teachers at the school. Maybe this will be an opening to get to know them a bit better.

Video apartment tour

We thought that some of you might enjoy a video walk-through of our apartment...

Here it is...

Week 1 in Weinan

by Ruth

I'm not really "feeling" the writing, but I did promise we will update more, so I will give it a go. You already saw Kevin's story about our interesting travel adventure, but in the end everything worked out okay. We arrived at our apartments not long before 2am, brushed the top layer of dust off the bed before falling asleep, and then woke up at 6am (jetlag). We hired some cleaning ladies to come and clean our apartment, which was totally worth it. They worked for about five hours and cleaned pretty thoroughly while we worked at unpacking.

The previous teachers left a boxes and boxes of stuff for us, lots of useful things like linens, kitchen supplies, and a printer, plus some top rate food. Most of the basics, a whole box of spices, bags of chocolate chips, cake mixes, pudding...and 25 boxes of jello. Picture it. That's a lot of jello.

After about a week here, we have gotten most of our things organized and the apartment has acquired a new layer of dust. And it even rained this week. The weather has been "very changeable" (Chinese students' catch-phrase). The first few days were pretty hot and overcast/smoggy. After the rain and wind, the sky cleared up a lot and the air got cooler. Kevin and I walked to the hills behind campus. The campus is on the edge of the city, so we followed some railroad tracks to some small paths to some smaller paths and after about 20 minutes found ourselves in the middle of corn fields and fruit trees. We climbed high enough to look down over the city, and the air was clear enough that we could see the whole thing, plus some surrounding trees and hills.

Even though classes started last week, Kevin and I will not start teaching for two and a half weeks! We are both going to be teaching freshmen classes, and the freshmen start later than the other students. They will come to campus this weekend and then have two weeks of military training before beginning classes. So we have plenty of time to settle in, explore the area, plan lessons, and hopefully visit Yangzhou. We are going to be teaching Oral English, which we've taught lots of in the past, and Phonetics, which we don't know much about. The good thing is, we actually have textbooks, which appear to be decent. The bad thing is, when I look through the textbook I see words like "fricatives" and "approximants" and "dipthongs," and I have no idea what those mean. They sound like quasi-swear words. "Oh fricatives!" or "Those dipthongs!" I guess I will be learning some phonetics as I go.

We have started our office hours. About a dozen students piled into the office to talk and ask questions. They were very interested in us, of course, since we are the new teachers. It was pretty tiring (especially the first night when we were there until 9:30pm, which was really past our jetlagged bedtime), but we've had some interesting conversations. Yesterday they were telling me about all the ways they were naughty as children. It was pretty fun. The students are all very friendly.

We have been out and about a little bit. We have been to two different supermarkets. The other day, two little girls followed Christina and I around the entire supermarket just smiling and watching us. We have been to several restaurants. We have found some good food (Kevin was especially excited about the DongBei Restaurant (Northeast style food). Since we aren't familiar with the restaurants yet, we have had a bit of difficulty. We keep ending up in these specialty places and not knowing what we just ordered. Nothing has been bad so far, but it has definitely been confusing and a little frustrating. A lot of the food is spicy, which makes sense due to the proximity to Sichuan. There are a lot of Muslim restaurants around. There is a larger Muslim population in the area and even a mosque in town.

So, that's about all I can think of. We have pretty much gotten over jetlag but are still tired. I'm still ready to go to bed at 9pm. :) I guess all the confusion and wandering around and figuring things out takes energy. But it has been much, much easier than the first time. When we arrived back in China, it felt like we hadn't really been gone that long. It will be nice to get started with classes and into the routine of things, but for now, it's good to have time to settle in.

Check out new photos at www.flickr.com/photos/ruthiemarie. Apartment video walk-through also coming soon!

When a paper ticket isn't a paper ticket

Aug. 26, 2008, posted on Sept. 1

(this post is a little delayed because we just finally got set up with Internet on one of our computers – the other one may take a bit longer, judging by the numerous times the computer tech guy muttered a string of curse words after the word “Vista.” However, I thought it might be best to blog at least somewhat chronologically).

----------------
By Kevin

“Do you have your ticket?” she asked, looking skeptically at our boarding passes.

“Yes, this is it,” I replied. “This is our boarding pass.”

The woman at the Air China gate crinkled her nose and blurted something to her partner. “Something, something Meiguo piao,” she said. “...America ticket.”

Indeed, our boarding passes were printed in the U.S. by United.

Then she asked us to stand to the side of the line and wait a moment while she let other passengers board the plane from Beijing to Xi'an. Our apprehension level increased.

“Do you have your paper ticket?” one of the airline workers asked.

“They did not give us a paper ticket,” said Ruth. “Just an electronic ticket.”

More furrowed brows. Apparently a ticket from America wasn't the standard protocol in China, which perhaps we should have figured out when both the woman who re-checked our bags and the security guard asked similar questions five hours before. Yet, both of them let us pass, perhaps thinking that it would be better to let the airline deal with it at the absolute last minute, rather than five hours before our flight.

“We have a paper printout of the electronic ticket,” we offered, handing them the paper we got when we did online check-in before our flight left Atlanta about 24 hours before. Initially, they seem pleased, perhaps because it does resemble a ticket and it is on paper, but when they realized it had no Chinese on it, they repeated, “please wait a moment.”

Christina, our teammate, who is also teaching in Weinan, waited alongside us in our designated place just behind the counter. There are still 15 minutes until the plane is scheduled to take off. “I'm sure they'll figure it out,” she says. She waits to make sure.

We continued to wait. Curious, we glanced on the computer screen. Our names were at the top, easy to recognize because they were two of the only names in English on the list. Each time a passenger's boarding pass was scanned, their name disappeared from the list and a recored voice chimed, “Xie xie.” “Thank you.”

As the line disappeared, no less than three people frantically went to work trying to figure out what to do with us and our United-issued, all-in-English boarding pass for seats 30 B and C. Should they let us onto the plane?

“Clearly we're in the computer,” we mentioned to one another at least three or four times. Once we even pointed it out on the screen to one of the workers, but that's not the information they needed. We began to wonder if they would let us on at all. About this time, we convinced Christina to go ahead and board the plane. “I'm sure they will let us on,” we assured her, but our confidence was waning a bit.

With about five minutes before takeoff, I had a thought: “What about our baggage tags, maybe they can tell we're properly checked in if they see that our baggage tags are scheduled to go all the way to Xi'an.”

Ruth dug them out of her purse, but the airline worker smiled and said that's not what they needed.

Much later than I should have, I admit, I began to ask Dad for help, I asked that he would resolve the situation and get us to Xi'an, tonight if at all possible.

At 8:30, the time the plane was scheduled to take-off, there were still six or seven names left on the computer screen, a man began walking toward us. Apparently someone with authority, because the workers excitedly began explaining the situation to him. Perhaps he was one of the people they had called. He asked for our boarding passes. After glancing at them for a moment, he tore them and they let us board the plane.

We crawled to our seats all the way in the back of the plane and scrunched into the tiny seats and waited, longing for the emergency exit row seats we'd been given on the trans-pacific flight hours before. After about 15 minutes of waiting, the pilot made an announcement in Chinese. The Europeans seated across the aisle from us asked a flight attendant what the delay was. “We are waiting for clearance,” she said, pointing out the window at the heavy rain that was falling.

They began serving drinks. We continued to wait. After a good 45 minutes of waiting, another announcement came. The flight attendants rushed to their seats and we darted into the air. Finally, we were off to Xi'an. Only one leg of the trip to go.

The FAO at the school was tired, so she sent her husband, a student and a driver to meet us at the airport at 12:30. We piled into a hot van and sauntered off to Weinan, trying not to choke on the thick air. By the time we were home, it was 2 a.m. Exhausted isn't a strong enough word, seeing as how I think I'd dozed off for a total of 15 minutes in the past day and a half...

Hi Friends,
Wanted to let you know we made it to Weinan okay! We are glad to be done traveling. Right now we are working on getting moved in and cleaned up. The apartments are very nice, also very dusty. So we're trying to get settled a little. Apparently classes have already started...hmm. We will probably start next week though. After we find out what we will teach. We will soon get internet hooked up in our apartment and then we can give some more updates. Thank you for your thoughts!

T-Minus 10 hours

By Kevin

We're there. Well, not THERE, but our bags are all packed. We're under the required weight limits, and ready to go drive to the airport bright and early at 6:30 Monday morning, then take three flights (Atlanta-Chicago-Beijing-Xi'an), watching the extravaganza known as the Olympic Closing Ceremonies, oohing and aahhing at the spectacle of a countdown in fireworks, bicycle helmet clad drummers, one-wheeled glowy bikes, vertical runners, foating red banners and statuesque white-painted mimes. The London part isn't quite as impressive so far....I mean, transforming double-decker busses are nice and all, but psychadellic umbrellas, lipsynching pop stars in ginormous dresses and a really old Jimmy Page kinda pales in comparison to the spectacle the Chinese created. Almost seems like the Chinese worked on their part for four years and England worked on theirs for a month....

China definitelyy raised the bar for the Olympics.

Anyway, I thought this might be a good chance to share the comments former students shared about the Olympics in recent days:

"We are very, very excited," wrote a former student. "A lot of people do their best to make efforts,we hope this Olympics can give a very good memory to all the people, we hope people can see a new and developing China, during Olympics, we see a lot of stories, some of them happen during the players, some happen during Chinese and some foreigners,they are very excellent."

"I am very glad that you enjoy the Olympic games in China," wrote another. "It's really wonderful. But I think it is a pity that you haven't in china during the OLYMPICS. Beijing is more beautiful during that time. I have tried to be a volunteer for the game, but unfortunately I failed. Now I have been watching it everyday."

A third wrote, "Of course we all saw the Beijing Olympic, especially the Opening Ceremony. It's very successful, and that brings great pressure to London Olympic. All the athletes performed well in this Olympic games."

Anyway, all that to say, while the prospect of 30-some hours of travel (door-to-door) isn't particulary appealing, we are excited to head back to China and glad to have you along for the journey.

Repacking Again

by Ruth

Three days left before we head out, and we've been working on packing again. I must say, we're getting to be quite experienced at this whole process. I packed my bags up yesterday and was delighted to them find several pounds under limit (even after buying a brownie mix, two boxes of mac and cheese, and a bag of chocolate chips). I have decided to add a box of Multi-bran Chex. I was pleased that the new black shoes I bought to replace my old black shoes are not only more comfortable, they also weigh a lot less. Yet another reason to avoid heels. Who needs that extra weight?

Kevin's had a bit harder time packing because for a while he didn't have any suitcases. His bags, which have lasted through several years of international rough handling, got all bashed up on the way to back to Georgia. One was torn and the other had a bent frame. Thanks Delta. After a good 40 minutes of arguing whether they were damaged enough to qualify for a "damaged luggage claim," the airlines said they would fix the bags and send them back. Kevin got a call about a week later to say they were so badly damaged they couldn't repair them; instead they would send new bags of the same kind. Good deal! Thanks Delta. Unfortunately, they also said that the bags may or may not arrive before we left for China. Slight problem. We were quite relieved when the new suitcases did come with days to spare, and Kevin was able to commence with repacking. He bought several bags of tortillas and a couple of baseballs to bring along. So far he seems to be okay on weight too.

We on the other hand, have put on a few pounds as we try to eat everything we might possibly crave in the next year: pulled-pork bbq, pizza, Chick-fil-a, burritos, Rice-Krispie treats, biscuits, donuts, fried okra, bagels, milk... It's hard to fit it all in. Hopefully once we get to China we can establish a more reasonable eating routine, at least until we go to Thailand and the food craze starts all over again.

I am also trying to scarf down as many books as possible. I sat in front of my bookshelf last night and was very sad. I have so many good books. I want to sit down re-read about half of them right now. Instead I have to settle with lovingly browsing the shelves and book hopping. I am currently reading three books, and I just finished a fourth. It's hard to settled on just one when I know I won't see them again for a long time. Once I leave them behind, I think I will re-read Till We Have Faces for the sixth or seventh time, since I haven't re-read it yet this year. I am looking forward to what it will be like this time. It's always nice to have a familiar book in an unfamiliar place.
Except I just remembered that the book is inconveniently packed at the bottom of my suitcase. Oh well, I'm sure I'll have to repack again anyway.

12 Days til China

by Ruth

12 days til China and I am excited
to stand in front of a classroom,
to invite students over to our apartment,
to see a new part of the country.

12 days til China and I am uncertain:
what will we teach?
when will our classes start?
how will we get to the school?

12 days til China and I am nervous,
remembering the exhaustion of every day activities,
remembering the smell of sewage,
remembering that I don't really speak Chinese.

12 days til China and I am eager
to see how our team fits together,
to put away our suitcases,
to buy another bike.

12 days til China and I am hesitant
about yet another round of goodbyes,
no more fresh milk,
staring eyes and hazy skies.

12 days til China and I am glad
that we have a nice apartment,
that we can walk to the countryside,
that I won't be going alone.

The two blogs shall become one

By Ruvin

We warmly welcome you to our new, combined blog. Since we will both be in the same place doing a lot of the same things, and since many of the same people read both of our blogs, we decided to combine.

This new updated version includes:
*More frequent posting (hopefully)
*Two unique perspectives
*Fantastic photos
*The color blue
*Exciting stories
*And a bit of the usual randomness

Not only will you get the benefit of two people's perspectives, you will also be able to enjoy two different writing styles. We will sign our names at the beginning of each post to let you know who wrote it, but you could probably tell anyway. Writer Kevin contributes a journalistic style, delving into the cultural significance of events. Ruth provides a personal memoir type style, with random, often unimportant, but sometimes interesting glimpses into daily life. But sometimes Kevin writes personal stories (say, how he met his lovely wife) and sometimes Ruth writes cultural stories (for example, about Stinky River).
We hope you will enjoy this new and improved version and virtually visit us regularly during our time in China!