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Published: October 31st 2009
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The very first week of school was spent sitting tight within the school’s H1N1 quarantine (only applicable to foreigners, as the Chinese teachers came and went as they pleased). In past years new teachers were taken out paint the town with a complimentary tour de Yangzhou. In an effort to make reprieve for our immobile time lost, the school gave us a park pass for free entry into any one of Yangzhou's multiple parks. Last Friday afternoon was the first day our passes went into effect and we hopped on our bicycles and took advantage as quickly as possible.
Boy, oh boy! A weekend full of parks!
Saturday we headed out for the
Da Ming Si . The 75 year-old rebuild of the orginal, 1000 year-old, 7-story pagoda, overlooks the city of Yangzhou. The view from the top was, relative to China, spectacular. It was a beautiful day complete with blue skies; even on the clearest day though, the humidity and ongoing pollution always trumps the view. Oh well, our experience in China just wouldn’t be the same if the air quality was any good!
Afterwards we played Frisbee in the neighboring park and got plenty of stares. Not
one, not two, but three foreigners wearing shorts, sunglasses, and throwing a pie-tin looking thing. Heck, even a pie-tin is a foreign looking thing around here - and now they are tossing it upside down in a park?! Later that evening we rode our bikes to a street renowned for its street-food selection and generally economical prices. Chicken legs, lamb on a stick, pot stickers, and an english muffin stuffed with seasoned lamb, cucumbers, and cabbage. Two cold beers please...
Early the following morning, after a run though the rice paddies next to our school, we headed out for the Yangzhou Zoo. Zoo, or 动物园,
dòng wù yuán literally means “moving things park.” Our traveling companion for the day was an Aussie named Dave. Dave is a fellow teacher who loves photography and learning Chinese. Having been told that China’s zoos have the potential for extreme disappointment, we were not sure what to expect from our own hometown animal park. Hoping not to find the depressing type of zoo, we were thrilled to find that almost all the exhibits had lots of space and were similar to those of the zoos back at home. Ish.
While the exhibits
may have felt sort of like those at home, the zoo had attractions not found in zoos back in the States. One thing was the presence of an amusement park similar to the ones found in K-Mart parking lots, complete with rusty, cheap mini-roller coasters. Another site was a huge pond with multiple giant clear plastic inflatable balls that kids could get into and roll around on top of the water. The best scene however, was the crowd of people “tenting”. Our tourist efforts had been seriously one-upped by wealthy weekend warriors who had arrived the night before - in their BMW’s, Mercedes-Benz’s and souped-up Jeeps - for a proper camping trip. By the time we arrived to the scene, the campers, completely decked out in North Face jackets and Asolo backpacking boots, had started waking and began prepping their freeze-dried camping food for an easy breakfast. A few must have found the ground too hard, for many of the vehicles were occupied by more than a handful of the campers who, sometime in the night, had moved to their leather-covered seats and weathered the night behind tinted windows in the reclined position. I suppose that anywhere in the world,
for camping to be called camping, a certain degree of misery and struggle seems to be mandatory. Of course, it just wouldn’t be fun otherwise.
Another non-animal attraction of the zoo was a beautiful little pagoda that housed a large, intricately carved, stele. The entire stone face, full of Chinese characters, told some sort of story hidden from our
lao wai eyes. If only we could read Chinese… The three of us picked out what we could and to our surprise were able to make small bits of sense from the carved ticks laid out before us. One portion we were able to read, 好广大人民中国, literally meant, “good wide big person people’s middle kingdom” and translated means, “The good moral people of China.” Apparently, when read in this context, big and wide doesn’t mean well-fed; it is a cover-all statement for morality.
While some aspects of the language seem painfully logical and simple, multiple other cases make us wonder how exactly it all came to be that 1.33 billion people make sense of confusing characters at the same time. One aspect of the language that we find frustratingly difficult is that a clump of characters, without any change
our chinese text
picture taken by Dave Lambert in spacing can mean one thing but out of context mean an entirely different thing - like 大象, said
da xiàng means “elephant” but with the two characters separated,
da and
xiàng read “big” and “spectacle.”
And now for the moving things housed in the
moving things park… The animals were delightful! The zoo had a cute little chipmunk and squirrel exhibit complete with a miniature house and bridge in the landscaping. We started making jokes about it until it was brought to our attention that there aren’t any of the garbage-burrowing creatures in our part of Asia or Australia. A paradigm switch of sorts - we found ourselves in a foreign world watching “exotic” creatures that we knew all too well from our own world. We also spent a fair amount of time watching a great exhibit of extremely playful monkeys leaping all over the place with a serious case of attention deficit disorder. Man, oh man, those monkeys made us feel tired just watching from the sidelines. Sometimes I think this may be how my grandmother feels about the two of us…
The zoo was a great place to practice our Chinese - hordes of
pagoda in the water
picture taken by Dave Lambert doting parents speaking plain, slow, simple, Chinese to their darling single children (the first of the one-child rule children now have their own
one child in early elementary school). We learned lots of phrases like, “look! The panda bear is eating an apple.” “The apple is red.” “There are four apples.” “He must be a hungry panda.” “Oh! Look! He is eating bamboo.” The kids are easiest to listen to and learn Chinese because they haven’t yet had the opportunity to tarnish the language with dialects, accents, or slang.
On our way home we stopped by one of the many Muslim noodle restaurants. The type of restaurant serves a style of food called 新疆, or
Xīn jiāng and the men who prepare the pulled noodle dishes, with their small white hats perched on their heads, hail from the far North/west hinterlands of China and are of the Uighur minority. Our lunch consisted of boiled hand-pulled noodles with various stir-fried meat and vegetables thrown on top and then finished with a splash of dark vinegar. These noodle houses make a safe bet for hot, quick, cheap (and of course delicious) food. Afterwards we rode past a
flowers
picture taken by Dave Lambert shanty of a road-side green house. Inside we found a lemon tree, complete with eight (!) nearly ripe lemons. And the price (aside from priceless) was a whopping $7.50. As we rode our bicycles home with the lemon tree handily tied to the back of my bike, we felt a renewed sense of people’s stares. At first we wrote it off as the fact that there was a lemon tree tied to the rear end of a bicycle but, well, people move all sorts of things via bicycle around here… Dave reminded us that I was a 6’4”, blond-haired, blue-eyed, foreigner riding on a ill-fitting bicycle creating a scene not that far off from that of a circus clown. Oh well, a beautiful little lemon tree now sits in our small apartment and we can chalk up the staring as simple jealousy.
The weekend, jam-packed with new sights, smells, and tastes, turned out to be a great two days away from our teaching. The lemon tree was, so-far, my best impulse purchase of the year and the gin and tonics later that evening had never tasted finer than with that of a slice from a freshly picked lemon.
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