Arrival in China

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Leaving England

Francineand I (she's French) left Heathrow in the evening of August 28th and arrived the next morning at 8:30 am at Shanghai's Pu Dong International Airport in the pouring rain. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, local time. Our first view of China was not inspiring. My lovely friend Sun Wen Li, whom I had met in Cambridge, and with whom I had exchanged English for Chinese conversation over a period of about two years, came with her friend William to pick us up at the airport and take us on the one and a half hour drive across Shanghai to the hotel she had found for us.

Arrival in Shanghai

It was a lovely, clean hotel, very inexpensive (by European standards) and had the added advantage of internet in the room. We stayed in Shanghai for two nights, and on the 31st Wen Li came to collect us in the afternoon to take us to the other Shanghai airport at Hong Qiao, so we could catch the plane to Lin Yi.
One of the first things we did the day after our arrival in Lin Yi was to buy bikes at 20 euros each. They practically fall apart as we ride, since the nuts weren't tightened up at the factory, but we can get around. It's a big city, and walking is tiring, but the buses are 10c of a euro per trip. However the routes don't go exactly where we want to go, so bikes are better. You can hire a 3-in-line bike for 10 euros a week! You can buy a second hand electric bike for 70 euros. So we ride our bikes, and park them in official cycle parks for 0.10 euros. We both ate on our second evening a very delicious filling meal for 3.5 euros for the 2 of us. I shall give prices in euros, since they are so easy to calculate, there being almost exactly 10 yuan to the euro.

Lin Yi

We love this place. The people are really lovely. So friendly. They haven't seen many foreigners, so they are fascinated by us, and especially by Francine with her long blond hair. We soon get crowds around, especially if we take a photo, or buy something small at a street stall, or even if I ask a question. They are all very polite about my Chinese!At the moment we have no work - they say term begins on the 16th (strange, that's a Sunday!) - but we went to a meeting in the PE dept where they wanted to know about Francine, what she could do, what qualifications she had. We were welcomed by the director of the PE dept, and a translator translated his words into English, sometimes not coherently, and I had to translate what he said back into French. The were a bit worried about how F would be able to cope with a class of 60, 80, 100 or even 120 students. They said they would find someone to come along and help her. She was afraid the "assistant" might be spying on her! There are lots of markets here, all rather dirty, but very few flies, and the people are really kind and friendly. I feel I could probably live here. I don't know if I'll be thinking the same way in a year's time!
The town of Lin Yi is a vast sprawling city with about half a million inhabitants. There is building going on everywhere as China puts its new wealth to use. We visited the new campus recently. It's mostly finished, but a big part is still under construction. It's enormous - like a city in itself, but I have forgotten how many tens of thousands of students it caters for. I think it was something like 30,000.

New friends

I'm developing new friends here. Invited 3 out for an evening meal that knocked me back 3 euros 50! One an American fundamentalist Christian, whose very prominent crucifix round his neck looks decidedly phallic. He'd never noticed that before, but once it was pointed out, there was no escaping the idea. I wonder if he'll be wearing it tomorrow.I had to spend the afternoon being present at a tennis match between the local champion and Francine, and the director of the PE dept, plus the driver. I got on very well with the driver, even though he has a very strong local accent. But I had ben invited just in case the director, who speaks no English, needed to converse with Francine. Fortunately the tennis champion speaks pretty good English, so my services were required only for one word! Instead, I wandered around, watched the old ladies doing very gentle exercises in the park, and watched a tense game of Chinese chess, where the better player made a stupid move and lost the game, to howls of laughter from everyone! I also spoke to the English teacher in a school which was recruiting students. Her English was fairly fluent, but she made some bad mistakes. In the evening back at the university I met a colleague, another English teacher, who says "urally" for "usually", and when three of us, native English speakers, got her to say "You sure-ally", so that it sounded right, she was adamant this was wrong because her Chinese teacher of English had taught her otherwise!
Francine's English is improving in that she is becoming more fluent, though tenses and 3rd person agreements and plurals are sophistications that will probably come later. I saw a man rummaging through dustbins the other day, so as I threw something away, I left 1 yuan on the step for him - about 10 cents of a euro. He gave me a huge smile, and a bow of gratitude, and later when he passed me, thanked me again. It is terrible that he has to earn his living from dustbins and that so little means so much to him. On the other hand, there are people in big gas- guzzling cars, bigger than people carriers, with their darkened windows, who are ostentatious in their wealth.

Cambridge English and Chinese chess

I also saw Cambridge University Foreign Language College, with a slightly adapted coat of arms of CU. But apparently it has nothing at all to do with Cambridge University, apart from the name. The photograph is illuminating. I'll post it shortly.We have a new colleague - young man from South Africa, who has been in China for 4 or 5 months, and gives the impression he speaks Chinese - which he certainly does to an extent. But when there was something I hadn't caught in a conversation with a third party, I asked him, and he had no idea either! He told me he was very good at Chinese chess and how impressed the Chinese were when he beat them. I told him I'd love a game - and I beat him 7 times in a row!He didn't believe me when I told him that "My mother asked her neighbour to drive my sister and I to town" was incorrect, and that it should be "my sister and me". His English teacher had always insisted on "I" in such a sentence. He seemed to accept the logic of the "me" form for the object of the verb, and said his teacher was going to get a shock when he told her.Another colleague is a fundamentalist Christian who believes the earth is 6000 years old. He said the position of an atheist is philosophically untenable because the extent of what we do know is tiny compared with what we don't know, so we cannot say God does not exist. Fair enough. Then I asked him about his position on the Tooth Fairy.I also asked him if he believed in the gods of Classical Greece and Rome. Oh, definitely, he says. Once they were powerful, but they rebelled against God, and were then stripped of their importance and sank into insignificance! Wow! This guy teaches fresh young minds in the university! However, he is a good teacher, gives a lot of time to his students, and is their friend. He is also a very good listener, and a great teller of stories, and is in no way arrogant. I like him a lot, even though I disagree totally with his views on god and on evolution.

Bamboo slips and Scorpions

Today, Tuesday 18th September was an interesting day. I took my very dilapidated shoes (can shoes be dilapidated?) to the shoe-mender who sits just outside the university gates. I then caught a bus into town to see how the mending of my digital camera was coming along. It hasn't been performing properly ever since I dropped it on a concrete floor in Ibiza in the summer. It's coming along, but the camera isn't ready yet. Francine and I went to visit the supermarket opposite, where we were very surprised to see live scorpions in a big glass box. We wanted a photograph, but none of the shop assistants was willing to put a scorpion on her hand so we could take a picture. Instead they handed us some long tongs. Apparently scorpions are good to eat. I could have bought one for 0.10 euro. When I got back the shoes were not ready - because it had rained in the afternoon. We were beginning to worry about money, since we have been here for 3 weeks, and the money we changed on arrival is practically exhausted, and we won't get paid for another three weeks. But the man in charge of foreign teachers' affairs told us a bank account has been opened in our names, and we can go to the bank tomorrow and draw some money if we need to. That's a help. Today we visited an interesting museum concerned with two Han tombs. The Han dynasty ran from 206 BC to 220 AD. As far as I could understand, the tombs were discovered in 1976, and inside were many artefacts dating from nearly 2000 years ago. The find also included a few hundred well preserved strips of bamboo on which were inscribed the text of The art of War written by Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC. The find put an end to speculation about who actually wrote the book, and who his friends were. The characters on the strips were, on the whole in very good condition, and the strips themselves were kept individually in glass tubes filled with some preserving liquid.

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Photos

First view of China
This is what we saw from the window of our plane as we arrived at Pu Dong International airport in the middle of the Chinese afternoon.

Our friend Sun Wen Li
Francine is standing next to William's car, with her back to us.

Pig snouts
The local market has some lovely food for sale.

Notice at the Han Tombs Museum
The notice explains the find of the bamboo slips - if you can understand the explanation!

Scorpions for sale
There was a box of scorpions for sale at the delicatessen counter. Each one costs 1 yuan, 0.10 euro.