More adventures and some thoughts on Chengdu

  Chengdu, China
Friday, August 29, 2008

Hello everyone! I am sorry for not adding any pictures yet. I will try to do that as soon as I write this entry. It's just that sometimes uploading things on our shotty internet connection does not work very well.

OK so where did I leave off? Wednesday was the first day of classes and I talked about Tai Chi. That day was Mike's birthday, who coincidentally is one of the three of us from Northeast Ohio (in a side note there is also two others from Cincinnati here too. Ohio totally outnumbers everyone else). So we went out to an Irish Pub called Shamrocks and had dinner and drinks. Almost everyone from the program showed up. To get there we fit 5 people into a taxi which was amazing in and of itself.

Anyway, I had a spaghetti dish there (an Italian dish at an Irish pub in China haha) and some Budweiser, which was a little more expensive then Chinese beer but in all honesty Chinese beer is a small step up from urine. Qingdao pijiu (beer) may be really cheep (like under an American dollar) but you can really taste the difference in quality.

Bar at the shamrock

The point to all this is the the bartenders found out it was Mike's birthday (and also David's was in a couple of days) and gave them a free shot on the house. Now, normally this is not even worth a mention, but they lit the bar on fire. Yes let me say that again. They LIT the BAR on FIRE! They took out lighter fluid and poured it on and then just threw a match on it. It was really cool! You can see how close it was to those who are drinking. It was awesome to see.

The next day was my first Chinese class. It was a little challenging, but I think if I study hard and brush up on my characters I will do well. I know that if I need help Wes (who was the same guy who fixed our internet) lives close and took a good portion of this class already. So there is help.

After class four of us went to Carrefour, a four story french wal*mart, to get cleaning supplies to attack the mess that was our apartment. The best thing about Carrefour is that for every 88 kuai you spend you get a 5 kuai coupon. The floors were gross as well as the bathroom (i refused to not wear shoes in that room). So we mopped, dusted, threw away old food from the people who lived here last (ew right?) and yours truly cleaned the bathroom. Yeah I know shocking right? But it was really gross and now I know that it is really clean.

We went out to a place called Chicken Spot yesterday for dinner. My use of the chopsticks improved a bit but is still well below par. It took us a bit to find the place though because no one would listen to the person who had been there before (which I didn't understand. I believed her). This place has an English menu which was nice since there were two vegetarians with us (three in the group total).

In China instead of ordering individual dishes, you order dishes for the table since the serving size is so huge. We ordered some fried potatoes (so good that we ordered a second one but they had turned off their fryer or something so they were not as crispy), a beef and vegetables dish, white sticky rice, an eggplant dish and something else that I cant remember.

Before you go getting all excited thinking I ate all that, I have to tell you I was not feeling too adventurous that night and stuck with the fried potatoes and rice. I think it was also because of my pitiful chopstick usage.

After that we came back and watched a horrid B movie someone got off the streets. It was about an alien race taking over hot nurses and using the male patients at the hospital to breed for their new race. Yeah it was bad.

Today we had to go to the police station to register for a residency permit so classes were canceled. After that we went to this little shop with orange tables (that's why we picked it) for lunch. For 30 kuai between 5 people we got a noodle soup dish, a big pot filled with random unidentifiable things on sticks, a vegtable looking dish, some kind of Miso soup and two Pepsi's. That is a good deal. In American money that is about 90 cents a person. It was good in my opinion, though not amazing.

I ate some sort of egg that I thought was a potato. It wasn't bad. You see, most of the cuisine is cooked in the spicy sauce that makes it all taste kinda similar. Peanuts roasted in this sauce are really good. I improved a bit with the chopsticks, though I am going to say that is because the noodles were really good at sticking to the chopsticks. I also had something that kinda tasted like a potato but I really dont know what it was. It was all in that sauce.

After that we went to walking street to look at some of the shops. We didn't have a lot of time because Trista and I had a meeting with Wang Yun at 2. Wang Yun is a former USAC teacher who left two years ago to start her own after school teaching english program. She was looking for native speakers to teach some classes.

I am going to teach little 5 and 6 year olds English using songs and chants and games! It sounds so exciting. We have training on Sunday. The good thing is that the kids already have a small background in English and there is a Chinese teacher's assistant who knows both Chinese and English. It pays 100 kuai an hour which is roughly 14.50 US dollars. I am really excited!


Since I have been in Chengdu for almost a week, I have some things to share about the city. Today was the first day since I have been here that I have seen the sun. Apparently, Chengdu has less sun than London.

When you are a big group of 老外 (lǎo w鄆, foreigner) people will stare. It's not so bad if it is just me. But you still get those stares. It really isn't that big of a deal. It is really cute when you get the little kids who run up and say "Hello!" repeatedly. Today we had one woman just walk up to us and ask us if we needed help getting where we were going (which we did). Everyone is very nice. Just curious about a bunch of 老外. Especially the 6'+ ones.

The city has an interesting smell. It's the spicy food smell most of the time but other times it's a nice sewage smell. Their water doesn't smell the best either. Chinese people don't even drink their water unless they are really poor.

A big cultural difference between America and China is the use of diapers. Chinese people just don't use them. Their babies have a hole slit into the bottom of their pants and they just go on the street. I suppose it is a good thing environmentally given the magnitude of the people living in this country, but still. I won't wear sandals outside. I don't know where that street has been.

I am going to try and upload some pictures into their own entry. I love reading all of your comments. And if you have any questions just let me know and I'll answer you.

I hope everything is going alright in the states! Send me emails to keep me updated on your life!

Love you all. Till next time!