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Published: February 11th 2012
Our day starts with us waking up around 6am with the sound of the students 'wake up music' in the background. This week they have started a summer programme which means that they all get up earlier and are now outside doing exercises at 6.15 instead of 6.40! We turn on the laptop and catch up with the morning headlines and have even started watching video excerpts of the local TV news. It's amazing what you can find to watch when you're desperate. We have no access to television news as the only English station on our TV is a 24 hours cable movie channel. There are also no English newspapers available at all in this part of China. We also download the headlines of Aussie newspapers every day.
Breakfast consists of stewed apples and muesli. We have been able to buy green apples here though they are expensive as they are the same price we would pay for them in Australia. The muesli we found, again at great expense, in a supermarket in Wuhan. It is not available locally though we have started making our own with rolled oats and a fabulous range of dried fruit and nuts we have
found sold here. We cook toast (the bread is white and too sweet) over the gas flame and make milk coffee in the microwave. We use powdered milk as the fresh milk here is also sweetened and only used as baby food. Most of the powdered milk also has sugar added but through trial and error we've found a brand we like. The only coffee you can buy is Nescafe. There are two types of jam available which taste of nothing but sugar. Honey can be bought as the Chinese use it in their tea. No other spreads are available and absolutely nothing that resembles butter or margarine.
We shower before the water goes off. Every morning we have no water after 7.30am for an hour because we are on the top floor of the building and once everybody else starts using the water there is not enough pressure to pump it up to us. We have no water at lunch time and around 6pm in the evening either. We learnt very quickly to fill a couple of plastic bowls with water so we can at least wash our hands if we need to. If we have first class we
head across to the school - if not we put a load of washing on as soon as the water comes back on. We wash daily as we don't have a lot of clothes - particularly as the school have requested we wear jeans and casual clothes to work. Most of the clothes we bought with us were dressier as we presumed we would have to dress more formally to teach. All the Chinese teachers are dressed much more formally then we are. Our washing is hung on the balcony to dry. Everybody hangs washing out of windows or on the balconies to dry.
Lunch is usually home made soup or something we have bought on the street. Somedays we make banana pancakes for a change - though the flour available is only plain flour so they aren't the worlds best pancakes. We teach 4 classes a day each and between classes come back to our apartment to read, prepare future lessons or surf the net. We are spending too much time on the net but it does help fill up the day. We listen to music or Jerry plays his flute. I listen to a lot of internet radio
and try and catch 'The Planet' most days. Evening meals seem to follow the same pattern week by week. We planned a weekly menu and don't change it. We are limited as to what we can eat by what we can cook and the few ingredients we can buy. The only meat we are eating is chicken and we eat a lot of vegetables in stir fries or rice dishes. We tend to have an omelette every week - but I would kill for some cheese to go in it. You can't buy fresh juices and the orange 'juice' is only about 10% juice. Dairy products are not eaten here at all and cheese is not available. We've found a yoghurt that is not too sweet. Milk products sre only eaten by children. Every day we go to the supermarket - it has turned into Guangshui's version of the 'Coffee Club'! Most of the brand names we recognise (there are a few) don't taste anything like they do in Australia - nearly everything has added sugar and is much sweeter. We got very excited the day we found plain cracker biscuits that weren't sprinkled with sugar. You can't eat toast
with soup as the bread is too sweet.
We love going to the supermarket - it's an adventure just getting there in one of the many little buses that go up down the road outside the school. We have discovered 5 supermarkets in town and they all stock the same things. There is very little for sale in them that we recognise! All have scanners and checkouts so even though nobody speaks English we at least know how much to pay by looking at the till. They sell a very limited range of products. There is a wide range of shampoos and conditioners available but hardly any other hair products. I have not found hairspray here yet or anything that is like hair mousse. Lots of toothpaste but no mouthwash or dental floss. Heaps of washing powders but no fabric softeners or spray starches. No tampons are sold, only sanitary pads. We had a lot of trouble buying a can opener and eventually found the old fashioned 'dig a hole in the tin and slash up and down' type. The only corksrew available is plastic and will probably last 2 bottles of wine....which is fine as after the first bottle
I don't think we'll be buying anymore - it tasted like sweet cough syrup.
All the supermarkets have a big range of plastic ware in every shade of pink and blue imaginable! They are really into plastic fruit bowls but it's very hard to find a microwave container or a tupperware style container. We are still trying to find the end of the 'gladwrap' we bought 3 weeks ago.... There is an enormous range of lollies available - racks and racks of them. Also racks of packets of dried 'things' like fish, squid and what looks like seaweeds. The quality of the fruit and vegetables is variable with a lot of it being old before it gets here. Bananas are readily available so I eat a lot of them. I have never seen anything like the mushrooms they sell - they taste ok but the texture of them is like rubber. All the fish is sold either dried or alive. You choose the one you want from a tank and they take it out for you. As I have no desire to take it home and clean it we're not eating fish at the moment. We can buy frozen chicken
and vacuum packed corn kernels. The butcher sits at a big wooden counter covered with piles of meat and chops off whatever you want. A lot of fat (big piles of white fat and nothing else) is sold. All the meat sold seems to be pork. There is a lot of poultry meat sold, mainly duck and chicken. They love chicken feet. Nothing is wasted and you will see all parts of the animal or bird out to be sold.
The best part of shopping at the supermarket are the people that rush around trying to help us. Somedays you will have ten staff following you around and if you show the slightest interest in anything it's put into your basket. You spend half the time putting things you don't want to buy back onto the shelf again. They take your shopping list off you and try and read it - and we've had some amazing games of charades trying to explain what we want. Jerry had a great time when he bought a grater. The staff at trhe vegetable area get upset with us because we don't buy enough - last week I picked up a handful of shallots
(bigger then the bunch we would buy in Australia) and the staff kept trying to add more to it. They were concerned because the amount that I bought only came to the equivalant of 5c Australian! They kept pointing at the price and laughing. I had the same problem when I bought one capsicum. I guess they'll get used to us. It takes about 15 people to do the job one person would do in Australia. We usually have about 6 people packing our groceries before we leave the store.
Now that we've bought all the extra things we needed to make our life a little easier here we are spending very little at the supermarkets. We find it hard to spend Aud $10 (60 yuan) when we go shopping. We got paid yesterday for the first time - in cash with a big wad of 100 yuan notes. I guess we'll have to open a bank account here so we have somewhere safe to put that pile of notes. The hardest thing we do here is try and keep the apartment clean. The floors are hard to clean and you can't buy brooms with handles above waist height. The
locals mop the floors with great big mops which don't do much other then turn the dust into piles of mud in the corners. We have a felt carpet in the bedroom but vacuum cleaners are not available so we have to hand sweep it with a scrubbing brush to get the fluff and dirt out of it. So many things we take for granted in Australia are not available here - vacuum cleaners, large bath towels, (everybody uses hand towel size towels), blutak, A4 plastic page sheets, good quality exercise books.
Most evenings we watch a movie on cable or read. We are lookinh forwards to buying a selection of DVD's in Wuhan. They cost 6 yuan each - under $1. We tried renting them here but there are very few available. The local shops sell and rent VCD's - a cheap version of DVD's which never came to Australia. We don't have VCD player - our DVD is only in the computer. A few evenings we've gone into town but it has been too cold most nights. The one night we did go out was the last night of the Chinese New Year celebrations. What a crazy night!
It was the main night for firecreackers and fireworks. The stalls had been selling hundreds the previous week and all that night the sky was lit up with amazing displays. Unfortunately it was also raining so wasn't the best night to be out. So far though our life here is very quiet and certainly much more mundane than it was in Toowoomba. However we are coping and with long summer evenings on the way we'll go out walking most evenings before long. And the teachers keep saying in summer they'll take us to some karaoke bars so that's something to look forward to!
We've had some great weekends though here exploring the town and surrounds. There are only two other westerners in town, both 19 year old female teachers at the junior Middle school. One of them is the daughter of the teacher we replaced. Both girls started teaching here in September and will be leaving at the end of June this year. Previously there have only been two other Western teachers here. David, the teacher we replaced, also previously taught at the school his daughter now teaches at as well as spending a semester teaching at our school. It
is not a tourist town and most of the local people are too poor to have travelled to Wuhan so they have had little contact with Westerners. We are becoming well known around the city now - everybody knows we are teachers - but we are still constantly watched and talked about as we walk around. That is one aspect of life here that hasn't bothered me at all. I don't find the staring intrusive at all and when you catch their eyes and smile at them their faces usually break into big wide smiles. Everybody is very welcoming and all try and talk to us.
All the locals are Han Chinese but every so often you will see a face that looks very different from the rest of the population. The poorest people in town (you see them sleeping in the gutters and eating out of the rubbish bins) are we think people from Mongolia. They have very dark skin and their hair is very thick and matted (almost in dread locks). To be homeless in China is to be very poor indeed. The city is very dirty though they have made an effort to keep at least the main road free of rubbish. There are very few rubbish bins and everybody just throws everything on the streets. We can't do it of course and carry our rubbish around in our pockets. The spitting is pretty disgusting, particularly the sound of throat clearing before they spit! It is not a place you would consider walking around in sandals in!
A lot of the city looks like a demolition site - piles of rubble everywhere and very few footpaths. There are not a lot of private cars on the road - most cars are black with dark windows and belong to police or government officials. Most of the population catch the little mini buses, walk or ride bicycles. If you have a bit more money your bicycle has a small motor or you have a small horespower motorbike. There are also many motor bike taxis - they have a small frame built around them with 2 tiny seats for passengers. Big old trucks roar through the town loaded up with cardboard and bricks. There are a lot of hand drawn carts used to carry freight - the men who pull them really strain under the weight of the loads; they are really piled high sometimes with everything from furniture to bricks. The peasant farmers carry their goods into the street markets with baskets and bamboo shoulder poles. Sometimes they drive their tractors into town pulling a trailer loaded up with produce and all the family members sitting on piles of hay and wrapped in big quilts to keep warm.
The children are beautiful and like kids everywhere a little cheeky on occassion. They call out 'hello' and collapse into piles of giggles as you answer them. The babies are so funny to see - all wrapped up in layers of cotton wadding - you can't see them and their mothers appear just to be carrying big bundles of rags. The toddlers all wear split trousers so they can pee in the streets or whenever very easily without getting undressed. You always see this little blue (from the cold) coloured bum sticking out when they bend over. The teenagers look pretty much as teenagers everywhere but there are no hipster jeans. The girls do however wear their jeans skintight.
We've explored the city pretty well now and have even discovered some alleys of very old streets full of traditional houses. Most of the houses here are very ugly, all cement and tiles, without a lot of style. Very soviet architecture. We enjoy walking around the streets and looking into people's lifes. As the weather improves we will explore futher afield. The local peolple don't seem to mind us wandering virtually through their gardens. In fact a lot try and talk to us - Jerry is great with them - he talks away full speed in English, they chatter away just as fast in Chinese - nobody has a clue what is being said but facial expressions win the day and everybody has a great time.
Last weekend it snowed! It started about 4pm in the afternnon and continued all night. Next day there was about 4 inches of snow on everything - it looked very pretty but was very unexpected as we had even turned down our heating and stopped wearing as many layers. It became bitterly cold again for a few days. Last weekend we went to a beauty parlour with Melissa and Renae and all the girls had a facial (hour and half) and all got our hair cut. Jerry had a neck and head massage for over an hour. We paid in total for the four of us AUD $40. We shall do that regularly. This weekend we are hoping to go to Wuhan to check out the western supermarket (we've heard that they sell cheese) and catch up on some city lights. We will stay at the Holiday Inn - they have a coffee shop and sell lattes!!!
We are starting to settle - Jerry is very happy here though I'm still feeling unsettled. However I'm much happier than I was and the time is going by very fast. I am really enjoying teaching and the students sre responding well to my classes. The school has told us that we are doing a good job and that the students are enjoying our lessons a lot. We spend most of out lessons hamming it up - it's the only way to keep their attention. We spend the whole lesson being over the top and pulling faces and making them laugh! It's actually quite hard work and you do feel very tired at the end of four classes. The students are all starting to talk to us now in class which is great - exactly what we are being paid to get them to do. At the moment we are planning our 2 months away in July and August. We hope to visit Yunnan (where most of the ethnic minority groups live) and then travelling around the Tibetan grasslands. We also plan on visiting Xian to see the Terracotta Warriors.
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aspiringnomad
Jason
Teaching in China
Just read this with a mixture of fascination and pity at your predicament. This reaction doubtless amplified by our contrasting fortunes here in Shanghai. I then noticed the blog was dated 2005! As you may be aware, Chinese years are like dog years. That is a long time ago! Shame it wasn't recent as I was about to invite you around for a glass of wine and a cheese sandwich;-)