Christmas In the Eastern Hemisphere

***preface- it took a while to get the pictures attached due to internet problems, so I have actually made it all the way through Christmas day. Last night I was able to meet up ewith my family online, and the morning after I am still so full from last nights meal that I can't eat breakfast so it is clear to me that I have had a very successful Chinese Christmas.***

The holiday season has arrived and it is always a weird time when living abroad, especially in a none western country. You don't even really realize that the holiday is coming, bc there is no sign of it outside, apart from those sly shopping malls that have learned that they can boost sales by throwing a Santa poster on their doorway. But that doesn't create a christmassy atmosphere, and no matter how commercialized Christmas has become in the US, there is still an palpable element of excitement leading up to the holiday in the US that is absent and missed here.

Fortunately since I have been around this area for a while I have a group of friends, and they are sensitive (sometimes a little too sensitive) to my lack of western comforts over here. So last night I wasn't short of invitations to partake in various activities. These activities ranged from eating dumplings, apples, singing songs, and dancing the rabbit dance(if you don't know you better axe somebody!) with my 18 year old students(pass, thanks), going out to a KTV(correct pronounciation is Kay-Tee-Way, BTW) with a friend and drinking beer until I forget my own nationality, and finally going to a tea house to snack and watch some performances. As tempting as that second offer might be sometimes I chose number 3. I usually love going to tea houses, they are usually a pretty relaxed atmosphere where you can see some traditional Chinese arts, e.g. folk music using traditional Chinese instruments, traditional songs, or shadow puppet performances of famous stories or operas. I thought that kind of relaxing atmosphere would be fitting for Christmas eve, a night in China known as ping an ye or "Peaceful night." Of course, as usual, nothing on the night went as I expected, and it was awesome.

(quick interlude about a new Christmas custom invented here in China that I think is pretty cool. Like I mentioned Christmas eve is called ping an ye here, ping an meaning peace. The same character that represents ping in peace also happens to be the first character in the word for apple{ping guo}. So what has developed is a tradition of apple exchanging on Christmas eve in a way of wishing friends a peaceful holiday, and everyday. And I really do mean everyday there that wasn't a misprint. Never had anyone "wish you happy everyday" before, come to China they do it all the time)

The hot party started out at about 6PM. I was a bit late in arriving, which was costly since my door prize ended up being an advertisement for some wedding photo company and not a sweet heart shaped pillow that the first person to arrive received( the first person to arrive was a friend of mine and ended up giving me the sweet pillow, double score!!), and I got treated to a chorus of "friendly" hello shouts by very "friendly" people who I have never seen before as I made my way to my table. The layout of the party was interesting, as the food was served in a sort of buffet. There was not really any real food there, just a lot of snacks, which is pretty standard for a tea house setting. Buffet's are new to this area, and everyone gets so worried about the food running out (which it did, but only because people took way more than they needed) that it creates a bit of pandemonium in the buffet line. Take the following snaps, that were taken literally ten seconds a part, as an example:

The party started out relatively normally with a girl playing the guzheng( I know there are a ton of closet guzheng fans out there) a few songs, and some random games. One game was a quiz game that I would have absolutely dominated had I taken part in it. The questions included 1)who was Jesus' (human) father, 2)Santa Claus is known as St. what? and3) The legend of Santa Claus originated from what country? But I didn't take part and so had to gloat to myself in the back of the room while I quietly threw down ganbei's with some friends and snacked on moon pies.

But by the time it hit 8 o'clock I think everyone started thinking this peaceful night was a little bit too peaceful, it needed an extra gear of awesome added. The customers didn't come out tonight just to relax, they came to party, and by party I mean watch other people perform while sitting and watching. Cue the high school girls doing a cheerleader dance while the rest of the workers prep for the two hottest shows of the evening. It was a bizarre experience to be sitting in a room of mostly families and all the sudden see teenage girls bouncing around in tight clothes with techno blasting- none too comfortable. But soon they were gone and we moved on to a kid who must have been about 18 years old screaming at the top of his lungs to the point that it was really difficult to understand what he was saying. His act was actually remarkably lame, almost irritating, and really not worth mentioning in general. He only had one moment of utter brilliance that changed my opinion of his whole performance. He took two open 1 liter bottles of beer and shook them vigorously, then did a flip, using his hands to help him flip. In the course of his motion he slammed the bottles of beer upright on the stage floor. That last jolt while he was doing his flip helped the already agitated beer bottles to explode into a 6 ft. high fountain of beer that lasted for about 5 seconds while he danced around to techno with no shirt on. I don't know why exactly, but this struck me as one of the dopest party tricks I had ever seen. So simple and yet so effective.

But that wasn't even the most awesome part of the evening, nay. Moments later a few friends asked me if I knew what a zhu ru was, I hadn't a clue. They said "really little" and made measurements with their hands using the ground asw reference. I didn't have any idea what they were referring to until a dwarf(this is the nicer way of referring to a little person right? I am not familiar with the most PC way to refer to midgets) walked out on the stage to perform. I couldn't help thinking, "well this is a bit unexpected." The dwarf then put on a 20 minute show for everyone in the room. He ate fire, pierced the skin of his elbow, attached a hook and used it to pick up a five gallon container of gasoline, and finally as his coup de grace picked up an entire bicycle with his mouth and started spinning around. Not like a small persons bicycle either, a normal large bicycle. I don't know if any of you have ever seen a dwarf pirouetting with a bicycle in his mouth before, but I can assure you, it is one of the most beautiful sites you'll ever find in this crazy, crazy world.

(my only regret is that I couldn't manage pictures of the action, my seat was too far in the back, so my attempts couldn't come out clearly, and I was petrified of going up front bc there were various bastards that had had a bit to drink and were eager to talk at me and take pictures...alas)

I just had to quickly get out these events on the blog for fear of forgetting. I have had a lot of trouble getting time to blog recently, and the new year is coming, and with it the last entry of '08 for the blog, and also the LAST ENTRY OF ALL TIME for Experience Zaozhuang. It has been a fun ride but unfortunately my blog has been contaminated and must be destroyed, I'll explain more in that entry, until then I wish you all a Holiday season filled with peace, love, brotherhood, and fire-breathing super-dwarves!

Back to the scene

It has been a long time since I have taken a look at this blog thing. I have been trapped in the void of constant work for the past month or so and haven't gotten around to spilling my thoughts on the computer. I will soon be finishing up though and then will try to get back to documenting every living moment of the non stop action that is life in Zaozhuang. Here are some interesting things I have seen over the past few weeks.

A few weeks ago I saw this article on CNN.com which I found surprising for a few reasons, most notably the fact that China might be seen as a good place for clean energy, but also for the fact that CNN (supposed enemy of China) printed it.

For something a little easier and sexier to digest I recommend checking out this Korean pop video from the exciting television show Super Junior.

And finally here is one AWESOME television show, one of many that you can get around here. This website is the Chinese Youtube and is hours of entertainment if you can figure out how to navigate it. One would never even imagine the entertainment found on these videos.

And finally here is one way I find to relax on the weekend over this way. It might not be the most typical of partying methods, but it is satisfying none the less. Yesterday a friend and I combined forces to enjoy a Sunday Hotpot Extravaganza. A hot pot is a pot of broth that you you stew for a while to get the flavor. Then you turn up the heat, get it boiling, and throw in vegetables and meat to cook them up. Here are some pictures to make the process a little more clear:

The pot, and the raw meat about to enter the pot, but first we gotta wait for the pot to get hot:

The aray of foods that will enter the pot to be cooked, including cabbage, Carrots, Meatballs, Mushrooms, and Glass noodles

The homeless alcoholic I allowed into my home to eat hotpot with me, in goes the cabbage...

A shot of the cooking process, doesn't that look delicious?? It tastes much better than it looks, believe me.

And the post boiled meat and vegetable coma begins to set it, complete with an oil stained T-shirt thanks to my careless feeding.

This eating style is really popular over here, especially during the cold winter months when you are still forced to wear sweat clothes to stay warm inside, despite our coal powered heating. Nothing more fun than drinking a few ganbei's and enjoying boiled meat dipped in sesame sauce to relax on a sunday afternoon.

What?

Today I was riding my bike down the street, and saw a big black cloud of smoking blowing my way from down the road and wondered what ws going on. As I road by I took a closer glance and realized that it was just a couple of ladies hanging out burning a big pile of plastic right in front of their home. Glad I got to take a deep breath of that while I was out riding!

Week 13: Still Living

I have reached the thirteenth week of the semester, and am still managing to get by, though I have been really busy with a flurry of testing taking place over the past few weeks. Most of the testing that occurred I was administering, but I partook in (yet another)standardized test this weekend too... great fun.

Every year in China it's around Thanksgiving time that my mind becomes a haze as thoughts of family, friends, turkey, pumpkin pie, clean air, and beating random students and street vendors unconscious swirl painfully through my brain. The air quality gets particularly bad this time of year as full scale coal burning starts taking place in order to heat our apartments (and by heat I mean keep my apartment above freezing. I still wear a sweat shirt in the apartment). The mood of everyone in general becomes a bit less cheerful this time of year, thanks to the weather, and actually this is sort of a good thing for me, as I will explain later this weekend in an entry, but for classroom atmosphere it is a killer. And it is in these dull, depressing times each year that I usually have to give my mid-term exams.

I should preface a discussion of my midterms with a bit of a background on the psychological death grip examinations have on the Chinese students. The education system in China is completely based around tests. We might say that all education systems are that way, but in the American education system we at least have a few varied ways of evaluating students. In China there are only EXAMS, and they should be written in caps because there are really no such things as quizzes or small tests, there are only big EXAMS that have important consequences for the students. There are a series of national standardized tests that all the students have to take at various stages in their academic careers in order to continue to move on to the next "phase." My students are always so curious as to how the United States law could be so strict as to force their students to continue studying in school until they are 16 years old. In China there are many students who don't get a formal education at all, and by the time the students are 13 or 14 they already must pass a standardized test in order to determine if they will be able to get a high school education or not. After entering into High school they begin almost immediate to prepare for their next date with destiny: The College Entrance Examination.

The schedule for high school students in China is rigorous to say the least and the students face pressure from their family and their school that leaves lasting scars. The College Entrance Examination can determine an awful lot about the future of each student, since it is from this score alone that both the University and the major for each student is determined. Once safely in the confines of the University the testing continues. Each major has their own series standardized tests that students from every school all over the nation must pass in order to receive their diploma, and by the time most of the students are juniors they begin their 2 year preparations to take the next big EXAM： The Graduate School Entrance Examination(or as everyone likes to call it here for some reason, the Post- Graduate Exam).

All of these national exams go along with the usual exams that are given in each individual class each semester. But in China most of the time there are only one or two exams given each semester, and it is from those exams that their entire semesters grade is determined, once again making the stakes higher for each exam. There are generally two main ways for testing Chinese students: Written exams and Oral Exams (Holla!). The written exams will usually be multiple choice or fill in the blank exams(this is college level exams we are talking about), while the oral exams will usually just be the reciting of paragraphs. It is this sort of academic atmosphere that sucks the creative energy and vital spirit out of most of my students and turns them on test day in mindless test fearing zombies.

My exams were Oral, of course, and it was awesome. I just wanted the students to get in front of the group in order to give a short speech(minute and a half about something or someone who has had a great influence over their life) in order to give them public speaking experience and in order to allow me to see each one individually. I watched 350 students give speeches and my mind was numb after about 30. Everyone memorized what their speech, and most spoke it in such a monotone voice that it was sometimes difficult to discern who was who. This problem was accentuated by the fact that a few of them had memorized passages out of a magazine rather than actually say something about their own life, and apparently there are only like 6 English magazines on campus, because people were using the same ones. The students were all so nervous, angry, and nervously angry throughout the week that it was uncomfortable. I felt as though I was torturing them or betraying them by making them speak for a minute and a half. I even had the treat of four students completely losing their composure and breaking into tears in front of the group, two of which collected themselves and managed to finish, one of which quietly stepped down off the stage instead of finishing , and one trooper who completely broke down in to hysterical sobbing yet still tried to finish, until I finally gently interrupted her incoherent sobs and told her she did a good job and could relax. It is a real awkward situation to try and deal with a crying student in class, but something that I have become familiar with. Your instinct is to go up to them and try to help them, but then all the attention of the entire class is on them and they became self-conscious and more embarrassed. I have found that just leaving the student alone to compose themselves with friends works the best, and it seems from the reaction of the students that this is the most common method of most teachers here.

What makes everything so difficult for these exams is the fact that in general everyone around here seems to be terrified of making mistakes. Most of the Chinese teachers tend to make their grades based on grammatical errors and pronunciation errors(that they can hear) alone, (which I find funny because of the amazing amount of grammatical errors the teachers themselves make when speaking and writing) this makes things more dificult but there is also a deeper rooted fear of errors that seems to be a general cultural trend. It makes it a stifling atmosphere to try and learn a language in. My students and I both struggle in it, as I try to learn Chinese people will often not want to hear me speak Chinese because they don't want to hear me make mistakes, even if they can understand what I am saying. There is a history of showing respect for leaders by covering up the errors that they make and trying to display them as infallible. I remember reading (or maybe somebody told me the story, I can't remember anymore) a story once when visiting the summer palace. An Emporer went to a lake in the palace to learn to fish. He had never fished before, so had no skill, but the ministers sent a troop of servants to the lake and had them all stay hidden underneath the water. They used reeds for breathing and were all holding fish. When the Emperor would throw his line into the water, a servant would plant a fish on his cord and he would easily haul it in. As the day went on the emperor was hailed as a genius in fishing without learning how to do a thing. The intentions were good, the ministers did not want the Emperor to feel unskilled, and didn't want to allow others to see the Emperor in an "ugly moment," yet no learning could occur. I don't know if this story is really true or not, but I think that it says a lot about some of the attitudes towards mistakes and failure here that make it difficult to teach.

On the brighter side I was treated to some gems of quotes by students. One from a girl who was talking about what a deep influence Chairman Mao had had over her life, commenting that, "He has such great handwriting." Another came from a girl who said, "Because of our situation my parents were forced to work out for a living." In her defense, though, she was in great shape, I don't think this was a mistake. I was also amazed (once again)by the willingness of the students to talk about such incredibly personal events, the most graphic of which came from one little girl who was commenting on the death of her Uncle in an automobile accident, saying that upon arriving at the scene of the accident, "We could find no trace of my uncle, not even one finger."

It was a long week, capped off by another trip to Jinan for another exam. Too many exams make me John want to down a pint of whiskey and punch a hole through a window, so I am glad to be done with all of that nonsense and back in the friendly confines of the Zhuang. On my trip to Jinan I tried once again to take a train, and confirmed yet again that I am a huge idiot, and taking the train is always a bad idea. All of the seated positions were sold out, and so I was left standing on the train. It is pretty unreal, there are so many people everyday travelling on the train that there is no where near enough seats for all of the passengers. You are left standing in an incredibly narrow aisle, and constantly dancing around as people continue to walk back and forth up and down the aisle. Everyone is so accustomed to the crowded situation that they don't think twice about getting up and walking by you 3 or 4 times in 10 minutes just to see how their buddy's card game is going. This uncomfortable atmosphere(I won't get into the smell) is only made more pleasant by the large numbers of people looking at me, poking their friends, pointing at me and laughing, whispering "hello" to their friends trying to encourage them to say something to me I might understand, and then talking about foreigners to their friends showing their "expertise" on all things western culture. I think it is for situations like this that throwing stars were originally developed, but unfortunately I didn't have any handy on me at the time.

I did manage to pull out a few positives from the trip to Jinan: a large stuffed crust pizza courtesy of my girl on the side, Pizza Hut, a huge box of hot chocolate for the lonely winter nights, and a jar of half peanut butter-half chocolate that I have almost entirely consumed over the past day and a half. In fact I think I will go for another spoonful right now.


Hopefully this next week will be a little more exciting, bringing a little more entertainment back into my life and the blog, now that we are passed the droll days of examinations it can only be up from here, right?

Out on the Town: Beyond the Glory

Today is an interesting holiday here in China. While the US is celebrating Veteran's day on November 11th, China will be celebrating a more light hearted festival in "Bachelor's day." It is a holiday to honor all those who are single. After all it's 11/11 and with all those ones it's got to be for singles, haha! Am I right, eh? Get it!? Hehe, sighhhh...

There really is absolutely no celebration for bachelor's day. From what I can gather the only traditions surrounding the holiday are everyone laughing when you mention it, and single girls wandering off to the supermarket to buy pounds of ice cream to console themselves through another year without a man. The holiday does not, as I origianally thought, symbolize some sort of more open view towards the merits of being single, or a reflection on some of the problems that the institution of marriage faces in modern society. It is more just a game with numbers(11/11) in order to subtly let all the college students or people 24-27 know that their biological clocks are ticking and they should jump on the marriage train ASAP. Universities in China don't allow their students to get married, saying they are too young, and yet by the time you get to be my age (28) people are marvelling at the fact that your single and are wondering if you'll ever be able to get married(once you watch the video's below you might be wondering that yourself). I have been amazed to see a whirlwind transformation that has occurred with so many different young Chinese people that takes them from being one of my students, who can't cook for themselves, calls their mother for every decision they make and wear pants with glitter on them, to a woman(most of my students are girls) with a formal long black coat, dress shoes, a job, a husband, and a BABY in just two to three short years. Actually it's not so much amazing as it is frightening.


But anyway, I thought that I would embrace the lonely atmosphere surrounding bachelor's day and show everyone a different side to the night life in Shandong. The past few months I have been showing clips and pictures of rocking parties, crazy dinners, and marriages with thousands of people and lakes of Baijiu. But the truth of the matter is that not every weekend sees me performing songs, tossing ganbeis around with nameless bastards, or sitting next to drunken seventy year olds who won't talk with me. Actually there are many weekends where I barely interact with anybody other than superkmarket clerks. The truth is that at the beginning of the year everyone and their mother wants to get to know you, hang out with you, and introduce you to their 13-16 year old son who wants to learn English, but by the time old bachelor's day roles around, people are too caught up with their jobs, friends and personal lives, and just don't have the time that they used to in order to pretend to be your friend. So let me take you through a more common Saturday night routine that occurs every so often here, a scene that looks a lot like this...

How else do you think I perfect those silky smooth Chinese pop songs that keep the students swooning? Looks like I got a little bit of an itch there, can't figure that one out. Though after a while the scene turns rougher...

Oh YEAH, THATS RIGHT, I was just itching for my daily shot of soybean oil!! And for all those of you who don't believe that I just really took a shot of Soybean oil, you can all go straight to hell.

There it is, the raw truth of going out in these parts. Beyond all of the hype and glory of the Halloween parties, and television shows, there are the nights where I just sit in my computer room alone, drink crappy beer and soybean oil, and sing bad pop songs. Happy bachelor's day everyone!!! Remember, if you're ever feeling bored that vegetable oil is a great substitute for soybean oil.