Today we went on another exploratory bike ride to find a road I saw on Google Earth. As usual with China, the reality on the ground was a little different to what Google's all-seeing-eye saw from space, but we found our way up onto another ridge outside of town and rode along it... then down the side to find some noodles. Success. Little did we know that we had in fact scaled the mighty Cucumber Mountain. Who knew! Luckily, back in our apartment the Internet has allowed us to learn exactly how lucky we we were. Photos of that business can be seen here:
If your interested in looking at our Yongchuan travels, I've been mapping them right here on this, err, map. It only really works using the satellite picture view, due to some kind of bureaucracy that makes the streets not line up with the GPS when you look at the map view. It all looks lovely if you use the satellite view though.
That was the light-relief section of this post, so now it's time for some introspection. I've been thinking about life in China as I know it so far, and here's what I have to say...
Food in China is great. All the principles I have been trying so hard to live by in Canada; eating local food, eating seasonal food, and eating fresh food are the default here. Of course, these things would have been the default everywhere once... but such is progress. The disadvantage of all this local fare is that most of the things you'll eat in a "rural" Chinese city are made from the same ingredients. Right now, we are eating a lot of a kind of spinach-ish thing called "Hollow Heart", green beans, mushrooms, squash, potatoes, tofu, and cabbage. Meat can be a bit of an adventure and pork is definitely the most common. As a recovering vegetarian, pork has been pretty low on my list of things to eat until now, but I have been enjoying some of it here. Beef is also a good choice I have found as due to its higher price you'll get less meat and more vegetables in a beef dish - which suits me fine. Though the ingredients are fairly predictable, we have been shown variety is still possible. The regular haunts of the Maple Leaf School teachers are The Dive, St Paddy's, Baby Noodle, The Clay Pot Place and the street barbecue (names bear no relationship to the actual names of these places, which we can't read). The Dive specializes in classic Chongquing specialities, served in an "informal" setting. It's mostly oily stir-fried things including some of my favorites: kung-pao chicken, eggplant, and fried egg with tomato. Almost everything is pretty spicy. Baby Noodle does a mean noodle soup with optional fried-egg on the side, St Paddy's caters to the local university student population with more classic local dishes, and The Clay Pot Place serves up a tasty pile of rice and vegetables sizzling in a clay pot. Last night we were guided to a new place and had a kind of chicken stew, which contained every imaginable part of the chicken... including a foot proudly placed on top of the vegetables. It's tradition that every Chinese meal should contain rice or noodles... or it would not be considered filling, so once we had cleared most of the vegetables and chicken artifacts from our stew a few plates of noodles were put into the broth to finish it off. You need to pace yourself when eating out in China...
Before arriving in China I had read a few things about Chinese culture. Some were complimentary, saying how welcoming and generous the Chinese people are... some less so, focusing on the smoking, spitting in the street, and the hierarchical system of respect and friendship that is difficult for foreigners to penetrate. My experience has been more the former. Whilst our appearance and everything we do is hilarious and fascinating to the locals, the atmosphere has been very welcoming. Parents bring their small children over to look at us and say "Hello!", shorty followed by "Goodbye!". Whenever we are out in the evening, groups of Chinese drinkers will want us to join them for a drink and to give us cigarettes. Refusing a gift is very impolite in China, so I have learned that accepting the smokes and keeping them behind your ear "for later" is the way to navigate this social minefield. We have only been able to have conversations with a few Chinese people as not many speak English here, and my Mandarin so far only extends as far as ordering rice or noodles. We have met a few Chinese university students who are studying English at the university in the hope of becoming interpreters and this has given us some insights into life in China. It's amazing to most young Chinese that in Canada Lina and I do not live with our parents. What motivated me to leave a job in Canada that required many years of study and effort to get and come to teach English in developing interior of China is also hard to communicate. The luxury of choosing to take a break from more gainful employment is something relatively few Chinese have experienced.
Whilst my overall experience of our current home is positive, Yongchuan seems to be a town where any remnants of its old soul are being rapidly extinguished and replaced with shiny new apartment buildings and extravagant parks. Development here seems to be happening the opposite way to what I am used to seeing in The West. Instead of infrastructure always being one step behind the growing demand... here in Yongchuan a big city is being pre-fabricated, ready for the people to arrive. Where these people are coming from I have no idea, and I hope that whoever did the sums got their numbers right. We are surrounded by cavernous new buildings which are largely empty, meanwhile new construction is in progress all around. It's hard to imagine what Yongchuan will look like five years from now... but the plan is clearly for it to have a lot of people living in it. My concern is that with the focus on building more and more new things, the barely finished projects that are only a few years old are neglected. At what point will the rate of collapse meet the rate of new construction? I have an image of a city where the ever-growing periphery surrounds a crumbling core.
Finally, my life as a teacher. I never imagined myself as a High-School teacher, let alone in China. The experience so far has been quite difficult. The standing in front of the class part has been quite easy; partly due to having gained quite a lot of experience in dealing with other human beings through my various employments, and the fact that the students are generally very respectful of the Canadian teachers. What has proven to be far more difficult is making sense of how formal education works. Despite having been to school myself, once upon a time, I am struggling to understand the logic of teaching and assessment in a school system. The fact that I know very little about the technicalities of my native language is not helping much either. Sometimes I wonder if I am learning more than my students…
Finally, a reward for anyone who labored through all that (or cleverly scrolled down here without reading it). My greatest teaching triumph to-date was playing Poopycat, also boringly known as Telephone Pictionary, with my classes on Friday. I knew from experience that the most talented players of this game are those who have English as a second language, so imagine a whole class of non-native English speakers paying. In the example below, the jump from “superman” to “supermarket” really brought the game alive. The potential here is enormous.
