Our daughter, Bethany ended up driving us and all our stuff to the airport at 6:30 AM. Our checked luggage had a 50 pound limit. We had to do a little shuffling at the check in desk and ended up with one at 50 and the other two nearly there. The first leg of our flight took us to San Francisco. I guess that since we were booked so late there were no more seats left in the economy section so we were upgraded to Economy Plus – meaning the extra 4” of leg room, without having to pay extra. But we did pre-pay for the extra inches on the flight from San Francisco to Chengdu. We met up with our co-teachers in San Francisco, the Hadds, coming in from SLC.
The plane
for the flight to Chengdu was a brand new 787 – very nice! The windows were photo electric, so instead
of pulling down a shade, you pushed a button to darken them. All seats had TV screens to watch movies and
TV shows. Meals were included and they
were pretty good – for airline food. We
were seated in the middle section (total of nine seats across) so we really
couldn’t look out the window. We watched lots of movies, some were really dumb. It’s amazing we can get so far in so little
time. We gained a day in the travel and
arrived on Sunday evening in Chengdu.
The only hiccup was that one of our brand new suitcases had a tear in
the seam from rough handling. It took
time to get a United representative to check it out and she gave us a $50
voucher for a future flight.
We were met
at the airport by a school representative (spoke little English) and driven to
our apartments. It was about a 45 minute
drive from the airport, all of it appearing to be the downtown. Chengdu is HUGE! I think Houston has 4 million people but here
there are 14 million living in the city.
It is very modern as it has grown quickly with fancy high rise
apartments and offices mixed in with older buildings. Our apartment is quite spacious: a large bedroom and living room, with a
smaller office and very small kitchen, laundry room and bathroom. We were so tired (didn’t get any sleep on the
plane) and just went to bed without unpacking.
We are 13 hours off from Houston at the moment. All of China is on one time zone.
Monday, 08/25/2014
I think we
got some sleep but woke up early by Chengdu standards. We unpacked suitcases and went through the boxes
that the previous BYU teachers had left behind.
It eventually dawned on us that the power was out in the building. Apparently they are putting up another high
rise nearby and they shut off the power to the entire neighborhood for the day
to wire in the building project. It was
hot and humid and started to rain.
Our college
director (waiban) came by to tell us that we do not have the proper
documentation to work here. We needed to
bring our original marriage certificate and original college
diplomas. Well no one told us that! They would not accept the photo copies we
brought. If we can’t come up with them
in 30 days, we will have to leave (not sure who would pay for that). We had no phone service yet, the internet
doesn’t work, no local currency (they do cash only), no food, and terrible jet
lag. So how were we supposed to be able
to contact anyone in the USA to work on the problem? TIC
All the
other teachers of English for the college are housed in this building. One single woman, Nancy, who has been here
for 5 years took pity on us and helped show us around. She walked us (in the rain) to a shopping
mall where we got some money at an ATM and ate at a Japanese restaurant. Here Anne experienced her first squat
toilet. Clyde took some time at a
Starbucks to hook up to the internet and email the program directors back at
BYU about our “original documents” problem.
We did a bit of food shopping.
They sell such interesting things.
Especially in the street markets:
live toad, eels, freshly butchered rabbits, ducks, chickens, all
complete with flies at no extra cost.
So many
people here are on motorcycles, bikes and electric scooters. Even the young women. The young women look like they are going to a
cocktail party while the young men look like they just rolled out of bed. The girls wear really short frilly dresses
and high heels and then ride around on their bikes. When it rains they have and umbrella brace/clamp
attached to their bikes.
You cross
the street at your own peril! The power
came back on at 6PM and Clyde cranked up the A/C. It was all we could do to stay awake until
8PM. And then we were wide awake at 1AM
local time.
Tuesday, 08/26/2014
It rained
again all day today. Chengdu is like a
bowl surrounded by mountains (although we haven’t seen any yet). So they don’t get much wind here. The rain just goes straight down and not
sideways like in Houston. Nancy was so
kind to walk us to a bank to try and set up accounts that the school will
deposit our salaries into. Three hours
later and we may or may not have actual accounts. TIC.
We paid for her lunch at a local hole in the wall place, but the food
was very good. The menu was all in
Chinese characters – no pictures. Nancy
ordered for us and it was excellent. We
especially liked the eggplant dish, but have no idea what its name was if we
should ever want to order it again.
Interesting
thing about our bathroom shower. It is
one room with no tub or wall separating the shower from the toilet area, tile
floor and walls. (Makes it easy for
cleaning the toilet. In fact, this
design is very efficient if you think about it.
We can save several minutes getting ready for the day if we just combine
activities. Think of it as an “exterior”
bidet. J) The
interesting thing is that the shower only comes out of the hot water pipe. There is no way to mix in cold water. It becomes a real balancing feat to know when
to hop into the shower when it is not too cold and get everything washed before
you get scalded. TIC
We returned
to the shopping mall. We spent an hour
at Starbucks for more time on the internet.
At the variety store, Carrefour (like a Wal-Mart, only French), we
bought a table fan, some umbrellas, groceries and other necessary
supplies. We have a very tiny fridge and
no cupboards so we can’t have too much here at a time. We had peanut butter and honey sandwiches and
a piece of fruit for dinner.
We are not
supposed to drink the water out of the tap.
We stretch our water bottle supply by boiling water in a tea pot every
day. We use the boiled water for
brushing our teeth, etc.
Wednesday, 08/27/2014
Some
excitement around here. We woke up to
discover some robbers had been in the building overnight. Several apartments had cell phones, lap tops,
money, even passports stolen while the owners slept (ninjas?). The thieves somehow scaled the outside of the
building and entered each apartment through their laundry rooms. We all have laundry rooms with corner windows
so we can hang up clothes to dry (no automatic dryers here). We weren’t visited – don’t know why since we
are on the second floor– tender mercy maybe.
The police were called and were here most of the day. The building owners cut down all the tall
bushes around the buildings and along the walk ways. They came in and measured our windows for
bars.
Another
surprise for us upon entering the country:
besides having complete physicals in the states and sending in all that
info, we were required to do it all over again. We were put in a van and driven to a central
medical place for our exams and tests.
Later in the day, Nancy showed us how to buy lunch at the college
cafeteria. There are several cafeterias
around campus with a wide variety of food.
The price is very reasonable – maybe $2 USD for a big meal. Nancy met one of her students who joined us
for lunch. He is a PhD student who looks
like he is 14 years old. Of course now
that we bought umbrellas it was a sunny day – a rarity we hear.
We just saw
a huge rat run across the sidewalk outside our apartment. It probably lived in the bushes that were cut
down today.
Because of
all the recent rain, the weather has been cooler today. And the sun actually came out and shown. I understand a blue sky is very unusual in
Chengdu, primarily because of the air pollution.
Thursday, 08/28/2014
Forgot to
mention we did a batch of laundry the other day: only a small washer, no dryer. We are not used to hanging up our clothes on
the porch for all the world to see. And
then with all the rain (it rained again last night) it takes a long time for
stuff to actually dry. It was a bit of
guesswork as to what buttons to push to get the washer to work. All of the labels are in Chinese.
Today we met
with our college liaison to see about getting work permits. Because we don’t have the original marriage
and college documents with us this is going to be difficult, and we have less
than 30 days to produce them or else.
The directors at BYU are working on this. Also, because Clyde retired and did not have
the last two years be continuous work experience, he is being considered an
“accompanying spouse” – a kept man! Anne
never retired from being a house wife.
We tried to explain that he is far more qualified than Anne is, but it
did no good. They are being generous in
allowing him to be here and teach at all.
Anne is being assigned to teach oral and written English to the PhD
students and Clyde will be teaching the master’s program students. Oh boy.
He should also be getting paid more than Anne since he has a master’s
degree but we will be getting the same due to that accompanying spouse
thing. TIC
The liaison
is a cute little thing who wears fancy baby doll dresses and high heels. Anne did not bring any nice clothes with her
and only very sturdy looking (read “orthopedic”) shoes. Marilyn Hadd was wearing a skirt and the
waiban mentioned how nice she looked.
Then she turned to Anne with a raised eye brow and asked if she was the
sporty type. (That went over well, as
you can imagine!) She has only seen Anne
in T-shirts and Capri length cargo pants.
What does she expect – every day so far has been our day off and it has
been raining. The first day we walked
around the streets, cars drove through big rain puddles near us and soaked us,
twice.
Our
co-teachers, the Hadds, invited us over for dinner, very nice of them. Good thing since somehow they ended up with
the crock pot, rice cooker, and large convection oven. We may just eat out every day. Afterwards an expat member of the Chengdu
branch had her driver bring over the bedding the previous CTP’s had purchased
from Ikea and had stored at her place. The normal bed is more of a box springs than a
mattress. They will make the hard bed
much nicer.
Friday, 08/29/2014
We have a
district president here instead of a stake president nameed Weaver. And it is a really big district. But (small world) they at one time lived in
the Katy, Texas and know some of the same people as we do. (He works for Chevron.) Anyway, the Weaver’s graciously sent her
driver to our apartment today to pick us and the Hadds up to visit their home.
Compared to
us, they live like the proverbial “other half”.
Not only do they have a full time, personal driver, but also a
maid. I think she could have a cook too
if she wanted. They live in a gated
apartment community. Their own place was
formed out of two apartments remodeled into one. All high end looking furnishings. For example they have huge chandeliers while
we have bare bulbs, that sort of level of difference. Her driver then took us all to a place for
lunch that served Western style food called Leanna’s Bakery. Anne ordered a chef’s salad and Clyde had
lasagna, plus we both had cake for dessert.
What a treat!
The drive to
and from their apartment was also an eye opener. There is no end to the beautiful, exotic
skyscrapers and high rise apartment buildings here, and even many more being
built. It is a forest of tall buildings
much larger than NYC. But many buildings
seem to be empty. We wonder who is going
to fill them all. It is interesting to
see all the plants and vines that grow everywhere, very beautiful.
We are still
trying to get SIM cards for our old Verizon phones. The Weaver’s driver was trying to help us but
bought the wrong size. Our phones take a
mini-SIM card which the China Mobile store didn’t have. Hopefully we can return them and get our
money back. They will order the cards
and we should get working phones on Sunday at church. These will be just for use in China.
We had a
visit from the person in charge of the graduate teaching program. She spoke English very well and was
nice. She gave us a schedule of our
teaching assignments and planned an orientation trip for us to the old and new
campuses on Monday. And then, whohoo,
our internet got fixed! But then,
boohoo, our A/C unit leaked all over the floor (probably a clogged drain) so we
had to turn it off until someone can come fix it. Since it’s the weekend, probably no one will
come.
We first
went to the Buddhist Wenshu Temple Monastery.
It is like a small village, a lovely oasis in the middle of a very big
city. It was begun in the 600’s and
houses over 300 Buddha statues in several buildings, all different sizes and
made of all kinds of materials. There
was some kind of convention going on with lots of worshipers pacing and
chanting the same phrase over and over.
There were
several buildings on the property, some new and some really old. We saw monks playing Ping-Pong and badminton,
but weren’t allowed to take their picture.
Worshipers were burning incense and bowing. An old man was selling turtles. I was afraid that maybe they were then to be
eaten, but instead, people would put them into the “Turtle Release Pond” – I
didn’t get the significance.
Afterwards
we took a stroll down what might be a typical old style street with vendors,
next to a very upscale road with top world fashion stores. The old one was like a flea market in the US,
only here they have tiger paws for sale (see the picture below). Anne tried to bargain for a sea shell and a
polished rock but was not successful.
They just laughed at our feeble attempts at speaking Chinese. We need to work on our Chinese haggling
skills. We saw a long line at a bakery
and figured we should do like the natives and get in it. We bought moon cakes and some fig bars. They were different but very good. While Anne was buying the goodies, a little
5-6 year old Chinese girl came up to me, pulled on my hand and started talking
to me. I couldn’t understand anything
she said. But I would point to a body
part and say “nose”, and she would repeat it.
They I’d say “ear” and she would repeat that. Many adults around us were watching and
paying attention to our conversation. It
is hard to believe that we are really here in China and not in some Disneyworld
reproduction.
From here we
took the subway (a trick to figure out) to what must be their downtown,
although the entire city looks to me like one downtown. Within the 14 million people who live in this
city, we think only about 14 are Caucasian, and that is counting us and the
Hadds. We were the only Americans that
we saw all day during our outing. We had
lunch at McDonalds. The fries were just
like at home. The air quality makes it
hard to see very far, all is hazy. My
eyes feel dry and irritated.
Here we came
to a large statue of Chairman Mao in China.
This sign on the right was posted on a Western style toilet stall. I guess if the locals only use squat toilets,
they need extra instructions. J
Sunday, August 31, 2014
We took a
taxi to the apartment where our branch holds its meetings. We had to hand over a card with Chinese
characters on it in order to tell the driver where to take us. He got close, but we still had to call the
owners to come and find us and then walk a ways. The ultimate goal will be to learn how to
take a bus there. The Chinese driver for
the District President was able to get SIM cards for our old Verizon phones,
but we still can’t make calls on them.
Maybe I need to pay some more money to the telecom.
Everyone
there was very nice. There are a few
families (members of the US Consulate), a few empty nesters working for US
companies, and a few singles. Sacrament meeting
is in the living room. Sunday School is
in the bedroom. They rearrange chairs
for Primary in the dining room. There
were maybe 15 kids of various ages. It
was wild. Anne volunteered to sit with
them and help. Right now they only have
a two hour block but they will be starting up the three hour one once all the
vacationers get back.
We had the
Hadds over for dinner (had to borrow the crock pot). The plan is to take turns with Sunday
dinner. Other than that, I don’t think
we will be doing much cooking. We have
limited equipment, limited food we are used to, and our teaching schedules are
so different that we won’t be home at the same time for meals. Clyde’s first class is Monday and Anne’s is
Tuesday. And so it begins……..
We spent the
afternoon polishing our first lessons for next week. It is a good thing we had a lot of the work
done, because our internet was out all afternoon.
Thursday, 09/04/2014
After the
break in at our apartment complex some changes were made. Razor wire was installed on the top of the
brick wall surrounding the complex. It
already had large pieces of broken glass cemented to it. The vegetation was cleared away. Before, the plants were very “robust” and it
looked like a jungle. The place had the
look of neglect anyway. Now we kind of
live in a Gulag.
I should say
that the BYU couple using this apartment before us left it very clean and we
are grateful. I understand that some of
the apartments in this building are really filthy. We are all foreign language teachers in this
building. Most are English teachers, but
two teach French. Two of the English
teachers are single guys from Texas, three are single guys from England, a
single girl from Washington D.C., a single guy from South Africa, an older lady
from Minnesota, and a man from Colorado.
(Those are the ones we’ve met so far.)
The lady from Minnesota, Nancy, has been very helpful to us. We are a very diverse group!
Oh the
things you can see and buy in the grocery store! Baked animal head (we are not sure what kind)
artistically arranged on a serving plate.
Fried chicken feet can be found everywhere. Whole plucked ducks and swans. Octopus.
They don’t really do sugar or salt here, that’s probably healthy. So many things we can’t find like chocolate
chips, or are too expensive to buy like nuts.
Clyde really misses being able to drink a tall glass of milk whenever he
wants to. We buy it 1 liter at a time in
the aseptic packages.
Anne tried
to buy some less “sporty” looking clothes at the store. The largest size pants they had were XXXL and
they were way too small. (Notice how the
display is labeled . . .) Same for
sandals. The people are much smaller
than Americans. You can see the
advertising on the bag of oatmeal we purchased for breakfast. Really makes you want to buy their product,
doesn’t it? J
We have just
finished teaching a partial week of classes.
Monday was a type of holiday for the grad students. Anne teaches 5 classes and Clyde teaches
7. We each have a section of sophomore
students we teach twice a week. Anne has
3 sections of PhD students and Clyde has 5 sections of Master students. Anne’s classes are all at the new campus
which is an hour bus ride each way from our apartment. Clyde has 3 classes on the old campus. Unfortunately, we do not have overlapping
schedules. We teach at different times
on different days. While we both have
Fridays off (so far anyway) we are going and coming at different times the rest
of the week and so only see each other in the evenings.
The new
campus is very extensive with massive buildings. They seem to build things big and quickly. Students are not allowed to smoke in the
classrooms, but they do smoke in the hallways and that comes into the rooms.
The
classrooms all have old desktop computers which have Office 2007
installed. That means we have to save our
lessons in that format so the school computer will open them correctly. The computer monitor displays only in Chinese
characters. We had to ask students to
open Explorer for us so that we could find our lesson files. The rooms all have projectors and the large
class rooms provide microphones so that all the students can hear. The classroom computers are always locked in
a big desk in the campus classrooms. We
have to pick up a key from the office to unlock the computer desk for each
class.
We were
cautioned to have “lockable” flash drives to use for our lessons. We develop lessons on our PCs and then load
them onto flash drives to take to class.
The reason is that UESTC has all these computer nerds that create viruses
that will infect computers. Our flash
drives have a sliding button that will prevent anything from being written onto
them.
It is
interesting that the “premier” electronic university here in China doesn’t have
WiFi/internet in most of the rooms. We
heard the reason is that the students are so bright that some have hacked into
the school system and added funds to their student accounts. As a result, the school had to restrict
access to the internet throughout the campus.
Our classes
of sophomore students are small, maybe 15 at the most, it’s hard to tell
because they aren’t consistent about showing up. But our grad classes are much larger, from 30
to 60. Again, some may drop out by next
week. The grad students spend the first
week “shopping” for teachers. If they
like you, they sign up for your class. If
you are a good teacher, you end up with the heavier workload. If you are a bad teacher, you get a lighter
load. (We have mixed emotions on which
we want to be. J) Our younger students seem to have a better
command of English than the older ones.
It is so hard to know how to teach them.
Some of them just want to learn about American culture while others want
help preparing for their English proficiency exams. Some have chosen English names at
random. That helps us, but they sometime
choose weird ones. Today a student asked
Anne to be called “Cockroach”. Anne told
him that wasn’t a nice name and that he should take the weekend to come up with
a new one.
Each day Anne
has a young person wanting to practice their English sit by her on the bus ride
home. And they have helped her navigate
the campus or learn phrases to say in the cafeteria. The first one, chosen English name “Lion”, helped
us with our phones. As a reward, we took
him out to dinner so he could help order for us. Three dishes plus all the rice you could eat
cost less than $10 US total. One dish
was so hot (spicy) even Clyde didn’t like it.
The man at the table next to us (a real hole in the wall joint) smoked
cigarette after cigarette. Anne watched
small roaches crawl up the walls during dinner.
There was plenty of leftovers we told him he could take, but he didn’t
have a fridge in his dorm and they don’t eat heated up leftovers (maybe a food
safety thing). A woman came in while we
ate and took Clyde’s shoes to give them a shine. The second student, Jay, helped Anne order
something mild for lunch at the cafeteria – turned out to be mostly boiled
onions with a miniscule of pork shreds and a chopped up fried egg. And they (the cafeteria ladies) always smack
a large helping of plain, dry, white rice on your tray as well.
There are
two 90 minute classes before and after lunch that we know of, with a 2-1/2 hour
break for lunch. It takes that long to
get the students all through the food lines.
They all enter the cafeteria at once and it is wall to wall people. The food is cheap on campus, but we have no
idea what it is. There is lots of rice,
lots of noodles, very little meat, and always too spicy for Anne to
handle. This is a cash society, no
credit cards. So we are frequently going
to the ATM to get out some yuan and being charged a fee. One American dollar equals about 6 yuan.
We have
decided to generally eat our big meal of the day on campus (the old campus is
less crowded). There is a large variety
of food to choose from – most of which we have no clue what it is. We just point at what we want and it is
slapped on a tray/plate. The cost is
usually less than $2USD for each meal.
We brought
our Verizon smart phones with us (and our Republic ones), but even though
Verizon promised they would work here, they don’t. “Lion” helped us to buy some Chinese dumb
phones so we can call each other or people in China (the Hadds, church
members). They are really old style and we don’t know how to use them well. But we do get telemarketer calls in Chinese –
some things are the same the world over!
Our A/C broke. On the day someone came to fix that, the
internet went out. Always
something.
Another
holiday is coming up on Monday:
Mid-Autumn Festival. To
celebrate, our director gave all the English teachers a package of moon
cakes: a few little, funny tasting
things in way too much packaging. They
remind me of fruitcake with a flaky crust.
We saw people at the grocery store buying the big boxes by the dozen and
then stuffing them into large suitcases to carry home. Our diet in the apartment consists mostly of
oatmeal, yogurt, bananas, eggs and bread.
We’ve had some good melons and apples/oranges. They aren’t spicy, which Anne likes. And we sneak out every once in a while to buy
an ice cream around the corner for 50 cents.
We miss a
good work out at the gym (in an air conditioned room with a TV to watch at the
same time). We were told at training in
Provo that people lose weight when they come here because of all the walking
they have to do. Well those people must
have only ever sat on the couch all time.
It’s just walking, not an overall body workout. I normally have 15-20 steps on my pedometer
every day. We will have to be careful
that we don’t gain weight and lose muscle.
We bought bus passes and figured out the free trolley that takes us a
little farther outside our usual route.
We stopped at a nice Japanese store, Ito Yokato. They have a much better selection of
groceries and sundries than Carrefour.
Thank you for sharing your experiences with us. Having visited china I can totally picture in mind all of your adventures. The smell of the fish markets and the children's sit pants �� so fun and enjoy
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