Is it really November??

First, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. I can’t believe I haven’t updated this blog in more than two months. I’m sorry to those of you who actually read this for news of my China happenings. Just know that the reason for my neglect is simply that I’ve been completely absorbed in my life here, which I wouldn’t say is a bad thing. So, where to begin…

I. I moved into my permanent apartment in Chongqing City at the beginning of September. It is amazing—indescribable really—and I finally feel at home here. Plus, as promised there is an extra bedroom with real bed, so I can accept visitors at any time (hint, hint). I live in the center of town, but teach 40 minutes away by bus. At first the commute was horrible, especially Mondays since I had to get up at 6:30 and then ride the bus for 40 minutes, but I’ve gotten used to it now. Usually I conk out for the entire ride or else track the progress of the gazillion housing construction sites I pass on the way to the campus where I teach. This commute has created a bit of a problem in terms of bonding with students because I’m only on campus to teach a few hours a day and then I have to dash out of the classroom to catch the bus because it’s fairly infrequent. I’m working on finding a solution to this problem since it’s really important to me to spend as much time with my students as possible.

II. My Chinese is getting better and better each day, but that’s not to say it’s good. Let me tell you, Chinese is hard. I mean hard. I have a private tutor now and she’s a stickler for pronunciation (we spent 15 straight minutes practicing how to pronounce “xue” the other day), which I like, but even that hasn’t helped me make as much progress as I’d like to. I’m focusing a lot on the characters by doing calligraphy at night, which is quite relaxing. As one of my students said, “it brings [me] peace and relaxes [my] body.” The funny thing is that I often hear in the same day that my Chinese is amazing and then a little while later that I should study harder because I can’t say the simplest words correctly. Well, I suppose the important thing is that I can get around, buy things I need, and order food. And believe me, I have ordered a lot of delicious food since I got here, which brings me to my next point:

III. Food! Chinese food is amazing.

A good friend cooked dinner for me one night. He made six dishes from scratch. It was beyond delicious.

I’m not going to say that I don’t crave Western food (there’s a phenomenon that always occurs when PC volunteers get together…within 4 minutes the conversation turns to Western food, discussed in vivid, glowing detail) but I’m actually starting to deeply crave several Chinese dishes on a regular basis. Now that it’s getting colder I’m always craving Hot Pot, a special dish from Chongqing/Sichuan (check out the Anthony Bourdain No Reservations episode on China if you want to understand what Hot Pot is). I’ve also established a few regular lunch places near my house where I get my favorite dishes: tomato and egg noodles, home-style tofu, and vegetable dumplings. It feels pretty great to have my own haunts where the staff knows me and can predict what I want to eat. At the dumpling restaurant the waitress, who is probably about 16, calls me jiejie (older sister), a typical Chinese address, but not something that many people call me since I’m a foreigner. As silly as it sounds, by uttering these words she’s really helped me feel like I’m integrating, at least a little, which is after all one of the goals of PC...

IV. Speaking of PC goals, I’m working on the other two (basically they can be summed up as “help out the local people” and “learn about and respect their culture while teaching about yours”). I teach 8 classes for students: six oral English and two writing. I’m also teaching an oral English class for teachers once a week. Right now I’m contemplating what to do for my secondary project. Some volunteers work on gender issues, some simply try to get more students excited about learning English through book clubs and the like. As for me, I really don’t know what the best choice for my community is yet. For my writing class I have my students keep weekly journals and in one of the entries I asked them to write about what they might like to change about themselves and why. Almost all of the students wrote that they wished they had more confidence, which really surprised me. This left me thinking that I should do some sort of project that might boost their self confidence because they truly are amazing people and I want them to see that. I’ll keep you posted on what I come up with.

Okay, there’s much, much more to tell, but I figure I should post this now or it’ll never happen. I get side-tracked easily these days, but since life is starting to have a rhythm and I feel settled now, I should be able to write more. I’ll end with a quick funny story: While teaching one morning an injured bat flew into my classroom and proceeded to flop around on the floor while my students and I stared on helplessly. After about two minutes I realized that I was the authority figure (sometimes it’s easy for me to forget this) and should probably do something, but I really didn’t know what to do with an injured bat, so I turned to my students and said, “I don’t know what to do.” One of my boy students then got up, picked the bat up (with his bare hands! Why did I let him do that?) and put it on the window ledge. There was nothing to do after that but go on discussing the rhetorical triangle. I felt horrible.

I miss all of you! I hope life is treating you well!

I'm going to 重庆!

Finally! We had site announcements on Tuesday and now I know where I'll be living/working for the next two years: Chongqing University of Science and Technology in Chongqing City. I am beyond thrilled about this placement. Let me tell you why:

1. It's in the heart of the city. I'm in a "borough" of Chongqing City called Da Ping, which is situated right off the monorail line (yes, there's a monorail!), so I can easily hop onto that to head into downtown Chongqing. The shape and layout of the city actually looks a lot like Manhattan and if you know me, you know how exciting that is for me. Plus, the previous volunteer left me a two-page long list of things to see/do in town, so I'll be plenty busy.

Chongqing at night

2. Most of my closest friends in PC are located nearby. Jake is only a ten minute monorail ride away and I can reach almost everyone else within half an hour. Having this support is going to be amazing.

3. Based on my apartment description, I'll have my own 2-bedroom apartment complete with (among other things) A/C and....*drum roll*.....a DRYER! Listen: this is basically unheard of in China. Am I really in the Peace Corps???

4. Most of the students at my university are boys and thus most of my English students will be boys, which is unusual for PC China's TEFL program. I think this will allow me to have a different teaching experience and compare what my classes are like versus others' classes to get a wider understanding of university life in China. Plus, I'll get to teach Petroleum majors (among others), so I hope to learn more about this area myself and, perhaps more importantly, hopefully can have a positive impact on these students whose career choices could have a huge impact on the entire world.

5. My site-mate is another China 13 named Chris. He's from New Jersey and ensures that everyone knows it at all times. Oh, the stories I could tell you about this guy. Simply put, he's hilarious and should make the next two years quite interesting.

Alright, to keep it balanced, here are a few things I may struggle with (really, though, there's not many):

1. Chongqing is an industrial city and thus the pollution level is fairly high (like any industrial city). Luckily the Peace Corps gives all volunteers air-purifiers to run in their apartments, so we can give our lungs a break when we're at home.

2. The city is known as one of the "three furnaces" of China, which basically means I will be covered in my stinky American sweat 24/7 during the summer months. Remember to send me pictures of cold places when May rolls around so I can visualize myself frolicking through freezing, icy landscapes.

Despite these few things, I'm sure Chongqing is going to be absolutely wonderful! I'm visiting next week to meet with various people at my university, so I'll find out the nitty gritty of my assignment then. I'll keep you posted.

Elated,

Nikki

P.S. If you're interested, check out Wikipedia and Google Earth for pictures of Chongqing. I also found these websites with a slew of info in case you have extra time on your hands and want to plan your trip to visit me now. :)

http://www.chongqing-life.com/
http://chongqing.mychinastart.com/
http://english.cq.gov.cn/

Body Moving

Now, when I joined the Peace Corps as a TEFL university instructor I had no idea so much physical exertion would be involved. With the stress of adjusting to a new culture, teaching English and studying Chinese, a lot of us have sought outlets through physical activities. For example, during some of our fifteen minute breaks from language class, my fellow PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) and our Chinese teachers will play a little hacky-sack:

On Thursdays and Sundays a group of us gets together to play Ultimate Frisbee, which is always a spectacle to the Chinese students playing soccer and running on the track. Frisbee is not a big thing here, so they're very intrigued by the huge group of foreigners madly sprinting around the field. A few have even started playing with us. Last Thursday I convinced four of my students (two boys, two girls) to join us. None of them had ever even touched a frisbee before, but within seconds they were better than me! Once I get to site I really want to try and make an Ultimate Frisbee team/league because I think it's a great way to bond with students. Since the frisbee we've been using belongs to our Volunteer Facilitator, all I need to do now is to find a good frisbee of my own...

Last Saturday, the Peace Corps took all of the trainees on a field trip to Qing Cheng Mountain, one of the birthplaces of Chinese Taoism. They estimated it would take about 2-3 hours to climb the thousands of steps to the peak of the front mountain. Luckily, a few other trainees were as maniacal as me and were determined to be the first to the top. So, together we ran/jogged all the way up and made it in just over an hour.

It was a foggy day, but here's what it looked like from the peak

The trip down the mountain was much more leisurely. We shared crazy travel stories and tried to keep each other from sliding down the now wet steps (it had rained while we were at the peak). It was an exhausting but amazing day.

Showing some love midway down the mountain

So, rest assured: I am not just hiding out in my bedroom lesson planning night and day. I'm out exploring and experiencing. I couldn't be happier.

Wo Xi Huan Wo De Xue Sheng

Next week marks the third and final week of model school! I'm sad that it's almost over. My students are hiliarious and want to discuss everything from the one-child policy to why they would rather be a Transformer than King Kong.

Me and my students

I'm really glad we have model school because it's given me the opportunity to test out a variety of activities to see which the students respond well to and which they don't. For example, on the one hand they love dissecting song lyrics for every fragment of meaning, but on the other hand they don't quite understand the idea of a "cocktail party" (a standard ESL teaching technique of having the students mingle and talk in English about a pre-set topic). Whenever I try to do this kinds of activities they just stare at me blankly. They're simply not used to classroom activities that involve so much participation on their part. If not for model school, I would have walked into my classroom totally clueless as to what Chinese students are used to. Considering that in a few short weeks I'll finally found out my two-year site placement this info is priceless.

Overall, I've been having a ridiculous amount of fun and can't believe that a whole month has already passed! If things continue at this rate, the next two years are going to soar by.

I hope you're all well. I've finally figured out how to mail letters (it's much more complicated than you'd expect), so I'll write and send things as soon as I have time.

Teaching, Singing, Climbing

Model school starts tomorrow!! My class has fifteen students: nine boys and six girls. I've been told that this is pretty unusual for English classes in China and that at my final site my classes will have about 90% female students. Since all of my students are recent high school graduates, the first week I'm doing "College Life" and basically pretending that they've all moved to America to attend college. We'll have different activities designed around this, such as doing housing interviews (What type of roommate do you want? Do you want to live on-campus or off?) and selecting majors and classes. I think this will be a pretty comfortable theme for them and get them talking.

Any suggestions for second and third week themes? Please?

As a break from regular language class on Friday, all of our laoshis (teachers) got together and taught us how to sing a traditional Tibetan folk song called Kangding Qingge. Tibetan folk music is my new favorite thing. :)

Our laoshis in action

To recover from our week of lesson-planning and intense Chinese study, yesterday two other volunteers and I went to a rock-climbing bar downtown where you can simultaneously drink and climb a rockwall (sans-harness). I know it sounds like a bad idea, but believe me, it was awesome. Plus, we got to meet the #1 rock climber in China who just happened to be there practicing.

Climbing in khakis like a pro

#1 Rock Climber in China and his devoted fans

That's all for now, dear friends! Write me!

The Host Family and Various Stuff

My host family is wonderful; there’s just no other word for it. I’m the third Peace Corps volunteer they’ve hosted and so they seem used to my Meiguoren (American) tendencies. The second I arrived, they hooked up my computer and told me I should check my email. Over breakfast and dinner each day, my host mother reviews the words I’ve learned in class with me. She is so patient with me and my perpetually uncooperative mouth, which still refuses to grasp the four tones. Whenever I do get something right I almost get a standing ovation, they’re so proud. I love it!

The host family

Both of my host parents work at Sichuan Normal University: my host father teaches Chemistry and my host mother works at the university library. I'm the same age as my host sister (22), who is just finishing her senior year studying public health. She cracks me up because she absolutely loves to play World of Warcraft.

My host sister, me and my host mom downtown

My host family's house is nicer than anywhere I’ve ever lived. I have my own room, complete with balcony (!). We live on the sixth floor of our building and there’s no elevator, so I’m going to be toned when I leave here. Watch out, Chinese men!

I've realized that moving to a foreign country where you don’t know the language is kind of like going suddenly deaf. Whenever I’m walking somewhere around campus alone, I pretty much hear nothing because I can’t understand a single thing being said around me. Every day after language class, though, it’s as if I’ve gained a tiny bit of hearing back, such as when I heard a little girl say “he shui” (drink water) yesterday and understood what she meant. I wanted to shout, “Yeah! He shui! He shui forever!”

On the actual-reason-I-came-here front (i.e. to teach): model school starts on the 23rd of this month. During model school the other trainees and I will teach Oral English classes to Chinese students for 90 minutes a day five days a week in order to practice teaching in a Chinese classroom. Once we finally get to our permanent sites we may have up to 80 students of varying levels in one class, so this practice will be invaluable. The Peace Corps gives us complete freedom as to the course content (except, of course, for a handful of taboo topics), so right now I’m spending a lot of time debating what I want to teach. I’m hoping to be offered a literature course or writing course at my final site, so I’m trying to work some of that material into model school (even though it’s Oral English). I’ve contemplated throwing some postmodern literary theory at them but doubt that’ll go over well. I’ll probably just stick to discussing Disney movies as my host sister suggested. If you have any suggestions on what I should teach, let me know!

I miss you all!

Chen Ke'er (my Chinese name, which I can't pronounce correctly)

Whoa!

Finally! After a week of trying to figure out how to create a blog through the Great Firewall of China, I've succeeded! This post is a tad bit long since I have a lot to catch up on.

On the twelve hour plane ride from San Francisco to Beijing, I read Jonathan Franzen’s How To Be Alone. In the first essay I came across the following quote: “One of the great adaptive virtues of our brains, the feature that makes our grey matter so much smarter than any machine yet devised […] is our ability to forget almost everything that has ever happened to us.” Why am I boring you with Jonathan Franzen quotes? Basically, this is my main fear during my two years in the Peace Corps: that I will forget all the exciting, strange, scary, and beautiful things that happen to me. So, in an effort to impede my brain’s natural function of forgetting, I’m going to try and write down as much of what happens as I can and post it here. Here it goes…

After five days at a fancy hotel where my fellow China 13s and myself received briefcase-sized medical kits and instructions to not drink the water or eat fruits/vegetables unless they’d been washed with chlorine, we departed to three different training sites to stay with host families. This meant being separated from a few other China 13 volunteers I’d really come to bond with, which was sad. It’s been overwhelming meeting so many amazing people at the same time and then suddenly losing them. I was thrilled, however, to finally get into real life in China and meet the family I'd be living with until September.

The incredibly well-stocked medical briefcase

The first night with the host family was not at all what I expected. After I’d gotten settled my host mother told me she loved dancing and I said I’d like to go with her someday. She wasted no time and took me that night. Now, when she said dancing I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Val, Jake, Tasha and I had stumbled across a group of 50-odd middle-aged women dancing in unison outside a mall a few nights before (apparently this happens every night), so I had expected line dancing of some sort. Nope. Instead, I was ballroom dancing with some hardcore dancers. If you've ever seen me dance, you know that I dance like I have elbows for knees. They didn’t seem to notice, though, and I was passed around the room from man to man. After about an hour and a half of this I was ready to pass out and I went home to a cool shower and stiff bed. I have to say the beds are taking some getting used to. The beds I’ve slept on here so far have both been very, very hard. I had a Tempurpedic bed at home (it’s the astronaut bed!) and so I’m completely spoiled when it comes to sleep. I’m sure that eventually my body will adjust and my spine will stop harassing me.

In terms of food, things have been pretty good so far. Being a vegetarian hasn’t been as much of a nightmare as I thought it would. I’ve usually been able to find something good to eat. Plus, my host family is amazing and has been willing to make me tons of delicious veggie food (and not too spicy! Woohoo!). Today I bought spinach and onion dumplings for lunch that cost 2 kuai, which equals roughly .50 cents. That’s right. Ten dumplings for half a buck. Amazing? I know! Some of my more expensive meals have rung in around $2. I have to keep in mind, though, that I’m living on $1.50 a day here right now, so those .50 cent dumplings add up. One sort of sad note concerning food (but kind of a funny story): July 4th was my five year anniversary of being a vegetarian and that day at lunch we ordered vegetable noodles. Piled on top of the noodles was a huge glob of meat, much of which had mixed in with the noodles, thus my anniversary was marked with the forgotten taste of meat. (Don’t worry. It didn’t make me want to convert back to the wicked ways of my past.) Hopefully I’ll soon be able to speak well enough in Mandarin to avoid this type of situation.

Learning Mandarin is quite a challenge, but for only having been in country a week, the other trainees and I have learned an astonishing amount of information. I now actually know what the letter “X” sounds like in Chinese! The language teachers are great and the language program is so well designed. Four hours of language each day followed by more Mandarin at home may be exhausting, but I know it’s working and one of these days my brain will catch up with everything that’s going on around it.