Circus Came to Town

Miss Kirby

So after reading the old blog entries I’ve had… that’s right, all two of them…I realized that I have told you nothing about my daily life here. Take it all with a grain of salt. I love Loudi, honestly. Reading this though, you’d think I didn’t.

Our first week here was spent just getting settled in. I officially started teaching on September 9th. Business English—because, let’s face it, I have extensive training in Business. So basically, the night before the first class I had to cram in a crash course on Business terms. Only to find that my students barely understood the terms anyway. The first couple times I taught, I felt like I was a terrible teacher. My students always looked confused or bored. Except when they were taking pictures of me with their phones.

Tony only had one class too. Both of our classes were at 8 am. A time I avoided in college… I assumed all of my students would be so tired that they wouldn’t care at all about the class. I didn’t realize that it’s just common for them to wake up at 5:30 or 6:00. Even on weekends. I should’ve realized this, though. Given that at 6 every morning, the loudspeakers come on and an array of fast-paced Chinese music blares out until around 7:30 to give the students some work-out music as they perform their daily mandatory exercises. I’ve learned numbers in Chinese pretty well from one song that repeats over and over again the equivalent of saying, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8!” and so on. And on. And on and on. The song is seriously about 4 minutes long. I am, of course, lying in bed with a pillow over my ears and the drapes closed to block out as much sound as possible. I get up grudgingly at 6:30 and take a shower… broken windows and all. On that note, it’s getting colder here. Which means no matter how hot my water is, my bathroom is still chilly.

So for the first month or so, we were fairly free… only one class a week. Broken into two parts… 8-8:45. Ten minute break. 9-9:45. Every Wednesday. After the first week, we were invited to dinner with our dean. Great! Because all we’ve been eating is an alternate schedule of rice and noodles. (We’ve gotten much better since then. We eat pretty good every night—spinach and green beans from Jingu Market down the street…fried noodles, bell peppers and chicken… oh we’re good.) We left that first dinner with 10 more lessons. Not mandatory, but offered in such a way that it would be rude and probably detrimental to refuse. We would now be teaching primary school children Wednesday through Saturday. We asked when we would start teaching and our new boss, Mrs. Xu, informed us that she would call us tomorrow to discuss it. At around 9:00 we both got a phone call. “We are on our way to pick you up for the school. Are you ready? We will meet you by the gate.” Being a day that I didn’t teach at the college, I was (clearly) still in bed. So, I jumped up, pulled on clothes and ran outside to greet them. The primary school classes are actually a great time, though. Every afternoon during the week, I walk down to my school and teach about 2 classes a day, 30 minutes each. Saturday I have 3. The children are so excited to learn and so pumped up about anything you do. Basically I’m known among them as the “American” or “Miss Kirby” and when I show up, you know a game is going to be played.

A week later, we were invited to another dinner. This time, we were suspicious. Dinner, eh? Don’t trust ya. And, of course, we accepted the invitation. And, of course, we left dinner with kindergarten classes every Thursday morning. Kindergarten in China basically means undisciplined, unruly, unmanageable children. The only discipline these kids get is a whop on the head with a book—sometimes hard. Corporal punishment in action. Sometimes you might hear a “A-TTTENNNTION!” and the kids will do a little march and yell “1, 2!” But the quiet is not lasting. Yes, yes, I know. They are kids. They are supposed to be crazy. Just consider, though, each Kindergarten class has 3 teachers. Plus the English teacher that comes every day to teach for an hour. Which now includes me. I now have 2 of these classes on Thursday. Tony got out of it because his schedule at the college got changed to where he teaches his Business English on Thursday around 10:00 am. So I got stuck with his class. Which really is upsetting because the day they pinned his class on me, I was actually trying to quit the lessons altogether. Oh well. I guess it’s additional pay so I can handle it. At least for a little longer. They are cute, but so tiring.

My classes got changed at the college too. Not to another day. Just additional. I now teach a group of freshmen Tourism English. Considerably easier to catch onto than Business English. My Tuesday 8 am class, and strangely it also meets every other Wednesday at 10:10. I am now up to 18 lessons a week. Tony’s got 12. Some days, we are both pretty tired. Not that the classes are hard or even too long. I think the exhaustion may come from trying so hard to be understood and to understand. Thankfully, though, this has eased considerably. My sophomore students are beginning to know my personality. They catch on when I am picking on them, and they have begun to tease me right back. One student actually told me recently that the class considers me to be a friend—that I am patient and enthusiastic with them, and they like that about me. It was a good feeling. My freshmen are getting there, although some days we just stare at each other. I begin to celebrate little victories. I gave them homework, which they didn’t do, so we read the passage they were supposed to memorize as a class. I then asked who wanted to come up and read it… and suddenly I had a rush of students coming to the front of the class to recite the passage! It was amazing!! Especially since the most common thing to hear when speaking to a Chinese student is, “My English is so poor.” And this is spoken at almost a whisper. READING IN FRONT OF A CLASS. And loudly!

Tony and I were tricked, yet again, into giving a lecture a week or so ago. We were under the impression that we were just going to be saying a few words in front of some freshmen. Turns out, this was advertised as OUR lecture. To be given to around 100 or so freshmen students. Luckily, we had been teaching long enough to know how to talk to them. And to just use some recycled lesson plans. We had them laughing and asking questions for about an hour and a half. And somehow my phone number has been cycled through the student body to where I get random texts written all in Chinese, or better yet…phone calls from a professor who perpetually sounds drunk. I am now seeing more and more of my classes filled with students who just have free time during my class periods and have decided to sit in. I’m pretty excited by it, even though I’ve been ignoring the phone calls.

Xi'an

Ok, I know. Stop yelling at me through email. I can’t help that China has a massive firewall up constantly. I only occasionally get through, and even when that happens, it’s rare that I can get onto Blogger. So my dad had a great idea.. write it out, send it to my sister, and let her post it onto the blog. So we’re going to go with that plan.

Obviously I have a lot to write about; I’m just not quite sure where to start.

There are the big stories… the trip we took to Xi’an in the beginning of October, for instance. We were there for 7 days. Much longer than we had planned. We scheduled ourselves for 3 days, but we underestimated how fast trains in China book up. Especially when you are leaving one of the most tourist-visited areas. I should mention here the absolute absurdity of Chinese trains. You cannot book a train ticket online. You cannot book a train ticket from another station. You have to physically be present in the station to book a ticket anywhere. Which is why we didn’t have tickets home when we got to Xi’an. We had to book the ticket home from the train station in Xi’an. There is no other way—unless you have a friend in the city who can book for you. We managed to catch the 7:00 train leaving south to Changsha on the evening of the 9th. So we scrambled to find rooms at any hostel available in the city… luckily Xi’an loves backpackers… and we settled in for the week. Xi’an is best seen in 3-4 days. Those last 3 days can get pretty dull (add in rain) (adjust for cold).

The first day we were there was definitely a fun experience. We walked aimlessly down through the city looking for our first hostel: The Bell Tower Youth Hostel. So ok, here’s the Bell Tower. Why are we always SO lost? We weren’t too upset, though. For the first time since we left Shanghai, we found ourselves surrounded by Westerners. And suddenly, we were just like the Chinese nationals in Loudi. Point! Stare! I can’t believe it!! Other Westerners! We were saying “Hello!” left and right… waving, nodding to people. Wondering why the other English-native speakers were not as excited to see us as we were to see them. We finally stopped a nice British couple and asked them to point us in the right direction. “Go by the Starbucks, and it’s right outside the underpass..” Starbucks?! Amazing. Underpass?!? No.. we have those in Loudi.


Anyway, we eventually found our place. Rode bikes around the incredibly old and well-kept city walls of Xi’an. Xi’an is the only city that has retained its original city walls, so that was a great experience. Went back to the hostel. Met some nice people.. went out for dinner (which Tony and I ordered for our whole group in Chinese; that obviously made us feel pretty great), and then out for drinks. Ate some great road stall food at 2 am. It was a good night. We went shopping the next day in the Muslim Quarter, a fun 5-6 hours worth of negotiating and walking away from hundreds of small shops clustered together in old close walkways covered overhead with clear plexiglass. Again, some great road stall food. That’s the main thing about Xi’an: the food is amazing. And always being served. No matter the time, no matter where you are. Someone, somewhere, is selling food from a moveable cart, and that food is going to look a little unsanitary, and it’s going to be delicious. We have these in Loudi… but being Loudi, the food will be so spicy that part of you will wish you had never decided to buy it. It will be wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but your mouth will be on fire. I almost mean that literally.

We, of course, saw the Terra Cotta Warriors. It was pretty incredible.. but part of me was a little disappointed. I think maybe I should’ve sprung the extra yuan for an audio tour. Oh well, no big deal. Mai guanxi—it doesn’t matter. The emperor who had these soldiers created never told anyone. They were discovered in the 1970s when some villagers were digging a well. Imagine the shock you would endure as an archaeologist finding this. A never-before recorded phenomenon underground. Thousands and thousands of terra cotta soldiers and horses, all in battle formation. Three pits so far, more probably to be found in the future. And the site is still being excavated. The emperor’s tomb itself is said to be too dangerous to open. Think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This tomb is supposed to be full of traps for the too-curious investigator. The artisans who designed it were said to have been buried within so their secrets would die with them. Personally, after seeing those soldiers, I bet the stories are true.

So after seeing all these sights, Tony and I felt like we had done Xi’an. We, of course, toured some food stalls with the new friends we had found. Thought about trying some scorpion on a stick… settled for the fried egg, tofu, spinach thing. Said goodbye to friends, met new ones. Kept a running tab of all the phone numbers and emails we could rack up. By the end of our trip we were cold and tired from the sudden weather change. We had bought all our gifts, gone to less-visited areas of Xi’an. We actually spent the last day we had in the Bell Tower Hostel drinking coffee and eating chicken sandwiches…just waiting for our train.

There were little things about the trip that really stood out to me. There was a sweet old lady who sewed up my bag for me by hand. We had a great moment where the thread had slipped out of the needle and she could not see to re-thread it. So she pulled on my arm and asked me to help her. We sat and laughed for a good 2 minutes or so as I struggled to get the extremely frayed and very small thread through the needle. There was a great man who owned a vase shop down some forgotten alley who sold me a vase for my parents. He tried to tell me it was Qing Dynasty, until I started laughing and began to bargain with him. Once he decided I was not just some easily confused tourist, we began to have a good time just talking to each other. Or maybe I should mention the crowd Tony and I drew in a park. We were sitting on a bench just relaxing our legs from all the walking we had done that day. First it was one lady. She came to talk to us, completely in Chinese. No matter how many times we told her we didn’t understand (Wŏ bu dong!), she kept it coming. Suddenly there were two kids, and an old man in a military getup. Then another man. Then an old man who could speak some English who explained to the rest of the group, “They are from America. This… his wife. He is husband.” We decided that was close enough. And then suddenly we were taking pictures with everyone in this group. Individually.

I know. I finally update and it’s horribly long. I had to catch you up on Xi’an. Now that that is done, the other posts will be shorter. I really should have done this whole work-through-Sarah thing a long time ago. So, expect updates soon.

Don't Stop This Train

It doesn’t seem like 8 days ago, we were in Shanghai. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been in Loudi this long. I’m not even fully moved in. My clothes are still strewn all over my bedroom floor. My luggage is sitting at the foot of my bed, still crammed with things. But that’s the way of it, I guess. Moving in somewhere is always a long process, especially when that place is the complete other side of the world.

Shanghai was an amazing place. It felt very much like a large city, but not uncomfortably so. I feel like there are still areas there that I could navigate by myself. Although, once we were up in the Jin Mao Tower, I felt so small. The city reminds me of the ocean; there is no end in sight.

I’ve never seen so many bikes and mopeds in my life! And what you hear about the smog is right. But honestly, I’m much more scared to cross the street in Loudi than I ever was in Shanghai. Really puts you in your place, though, when a little Chinese grandma just saunters across the very VERY busy and rushing street without even checking if a car is coming. And she makes it across fine, because the Chinese are experts at last-minute decisions. Or maybe they just have one thing in mind, as Tony pointed out, “I’m going. And that’s it.” Either way, whenever we reach a street that has to be crossed, my heart starts racing and I immediately start looking both ways (like it’s going to help), grab Tony’s hand, and step out into oblivion. “Ok God, it’s up to You now.”

As Shanghai is now in the past, let me introduce you to Loudi. A city of 200,000 (or around 1 million—we haven’t been able to get a straight answer), Loudi manages to convince you that it’s huge when you are in the heart of it. The buildings shoot straight up just like Shanghai, and at night the city is blazing with lights. The streets are constantly crowded, and like I’ve pointed out before, the honking here is just as loud as Shanghai and the taxis and buses are even more reckless. In reality, the main area of Loudi covers about 5 or 6 real streets, minus alleyways. The rest of the city is taken up by the steel factory, which thankfully I haven’t even seen since we’ve been here. I have, however, seen an obscene amount of Wal-Mart (almost daily).

My apartment is on the 6^th floor of our building. I have a bedroom, an office, a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and balcony. It’s a great space, but like all new apartments, some things are in need of repair. As of now, I have a propane tank under my countertop in the kitchen but no stovetop to hook it to. There is a broken window in my bathroom, although that space has gotten better every day (thank you Mr. Muscle cleaner!). These things are obviously really small, not anything to really worry about. We’ve told the people at the school about them, and they promise to start fixing them, starting perhaps today. Internet is very intermittent here. As of right now, actually, I’m writing this entry in Microsoft Word because I can’t get anything to pull up. Just another part of life here, I suppose. I have been getting homesick lately, but I think that’s just part of it too. At least, that’s how I’m trying to look at it. Face the fact that it’s there and just move past it. The title of this blog comes from the song “Stop This Train” by John Mayer. And it really puts what I’m feeling into perspective. To help ease homesickness, Tony and I have eaten our past two dinners at KFC. It’s the only really Western restaurant in Loudi. We, according to the internet, have a McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. According to Loudi and real life, we don’t have either of those places. Only a very Chinese KFC and a very Chinese Wal-Mart. Which is great, but not when you are homesick.

The Wal-Mart is part of this strip of stores in the middle of Loudi. There are at least three streets that are blocked from cars and bikes. It is lined with clothing stores of all types. Even Playboy has a store on these streets—they sell shoes, hats, pants, shirts. It was the most bizarre thing. I saw a girl in Shanghai with a clutch that had the look of a Louie Vitton bag, except it was Playboy. The clothes here are really great, leaving out the Playboy store of course. I walked into a couple of stores just to browse the racks and immediately was greeted by the workers in the store, following me around offering me different dresses and shirts. I’m a little worried that my big American frame is too large for cute Chinese clothes. They are so petite and skinny! Emily found some cute clothes, but she’s small and petite too! I’m not overly worried though. I’ve already lost some weight from a steady diet of rice and walking. Hopefully in a month or so I’ll be sporting some great new clothes.

Every morning in Loudi I am woken up around 8:30 either by a loud display of fireworks—which are shot off for any celebratory thing and I do mean any--or, more recently, music played over a loudspeaker on campus. This morning it was Taps.

Tony and I feel slightly like celebrities here. More often than not we are stared at for a while, which doesn’t bother us in the least. We stare back. I was washing dishes in Tony’s kitchen the other day when a woman walked past on the sidewalk. She caught the sight of me through the windows over the sink and literally starting walking backward. She stopped right at the kitchen window and stared at me for a good 20 seconds. I stared right back. When I finally started to smile at her, she began to walk again. Two days ago, walking home from the store, a group of girls walked past us giggling. Once past us, one turned around and shouted “Hello!” Tony and I turned around and said, “Ni hao!” They all giggled and ran off. I can’t wait to have students. I really want to start talking to the people who live here.

Yesterday on the walk to Wal-Mart, we noticed many people setting small fires along the street. I know that traditional Chinese culture rooted in Buddhism teaches that if you burn writings or paper, it will reach your ancestors in the afterlife; at least that’s what I’ve read, and I hope I’ve gotten the facts of that correct. We researched these small fires online slightly and discovered that this month is Ghost Month. The Gates of Hell open this week and the inhabitants are free to wander the earth. Many villages have different traditions associated with this month. Some fishing villages float lanterns while others climb towers to “fight” with the ghosts. All the traditions are accompanied by the burning of ghost paper—little booklets made out of bamboo. Many Loudi citizens participate in this tradition. I wish I could speak more Chinese; I would absolutely love to talk to some of the people I see burning this paper on the street and ask them exactly what they believe.

There are some other very quirky, wonderful things about Loudi that I am just dying to tell you about, but I have this feeling that I won’t be believed unless you see proof. I also have a whole slew of lesson plans to work out somehow. I have to make a teaching plan for the entire semester before I start teaching on the 9^th. So until next time, zaijian.